Word: showness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Marxian formula is simple, scriptless, and enormously successful. Each couple of contestants (three for each half-hour show) is given $20 and a chance to bet on their answers to questions in a given field. Quizmaster Groucho perches on a stool by the microphone, and chats with them between questions. He encourages them to tell their life stories, and as they talk, he festoons the impromptu dialogue with strings of rapid-fire gags, or simply guides his victims into verbal traps and lets them writhe. "Women are the best ones on this program," says Marx, carefully flicking cigar ashes...
Fanny Brice Show (Tues. 8:30 p.m., NBC). Baby Snooks returns...
...stage & screen team of the Marx Brothers (The Coconuts, Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera), Groucho was on & off radio for ten years before anyone found him particularly funny on the air. Then Producer John Guedel saw him ad lib for ten minutes on a network show when Bob Hope accidentally dropped his script. Shortly thereafter Guedel put Groucho into You Bet Your Life. He still has some qualms: "Having Groucho as emcee of a quiz show is like using a Cadillac to haul coal...
...with microbes" had paid off with one of the biggest jackpots that has ever gushed from a scientist's laboratory. Dr. Waksman (rhymes with boxman) had become the discoverer of streptomycin, which ranks next to penicillin among the antibiotics and is the first of these "wonder drugs" to show hopeful results in the treatment of tuberculosis...
...sounds stilted when spoken. But on the stage, sometimes a gesture is better than any speech; sometimes words don't need music, nor does music need all the stops pulled out. Too often in Stars a wave of honest feeling brings a backwash of sentimentality; too often the show feels that the more it dots its i's, the more the audience will dab at theirs...