Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...might buy slapstick from this man, but would you buy stock? Funnyman Mel Brooks, 63, said last week that his production company, Brooksfilms, plans a public offering to raise cash for movie and TV projects. The company earned a mere $323,000 in fiscal 1989 and may lose money in 1990. Comedy is hot today, but Brooks may be running out of gas. He has had no major hit since Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, which reaped a total of more than $86 million in North America alone...
Despite these faults, last weekend's performance could not completely destroy Gilbert and Sullivan's lyrics and music. Gilbert's quick-witted criticisms of the arbitrary English caste system--as well as some of the slapstick humor added by director Matt Buchanan--made the audience laugh...
...Gypsy, a slapstick but chilling portrait of the ultimate stage mother, faithfully evokes the original Jerome Robbins production, including, alas, the cutesy, numbers-strung-together Arthur Laurents libretto. If Daly cannot quite dislodge from memory the performances of Ethel Merman and Angela Lansbury, particularly not as a singer, she rivals them as a force of nature. Coarse, thoughtless, unscrupulous and fierce, her Mama Rose is nonetheless just likable enough to explain why two daughters and a surrogate husband stick around so long and forgive so much. Among supporting players, only Jonathan Hadary, as Rose's agent and lover, excels...
...Slapstick, slide rule...
Despite the sophistication that underlay her slapstick and the respect she commanded as the first woman to head a studio, Desilu Productions, Ball said she saw herself as "not an idea girl but a doer." Like the silent comedians she studied (Buster Keaton, her onetime office mate at MGM, taught her how to handle props) and impersonated (her mirror-image confrontation with Harpo Marx and her Chaplin homage were priceless), Ball rehearsed every sequence obsessively. Yet when the cameras were rolling she made each gesture look spontaneous, each wisecrack seem an ad lib. Memorably, Lucy and her sidekick Ethel Mertz...