Word: swann
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Drop of Another Hat brings Michael Flanders and Donald Swann back to Broadway, for the first time since 1960, in a sprightly Mardi Gras of hilarity. These two Britons are suave, witty, sly, jaunty and civilized; as comics, their mastery of timing would shame a Swiss watch...
...Swann is a bespectacled cricket on a piano bench. He and his piano both chirp. Flanders, confined to a wheelchair by polio, looks like a maharajah temporarily deprived of his turban, bearers and ceremonial umbrella. He possesses the slightly disdainful aplomb, though not the waspish irascibility of a black-bearded Monty Woolley. When the two sing together in revue style, their words dance-whether it be a mock blues about the unrequited love of a nearsighted armadillo for an abandoned tank or a toast to the second law of thermodynamics in a foaming Einstein of boozy intellectual suds that tweaks...
...railway." One of Hat's high points is a wickedly malicious monologue on the art of olive-stuffing, in which he reduces the mystique of bullfighting to the noble, tragic grandeur of a pimento impaled on a cocktail pick. On those exceedingly rare occasions that Donald Swann opens his mouth, he can be equally and extravagantly nutty-as when he remarks on infant care: "If you put a baby in the bath and it turns red, it's too hot for your elbow." Inevitably, a few eggs are laid in the making of a comic omelet, but Flanders...
Clerk to Cook. According to Subcommittee Chairman Wayne Hays of Ohio, the sessions revealed irregularities aplenty. There was, for example, the peculiar case of the 22 travel credit cards held by Powell-committee staffers. Mrs. Emma Swann, a committee receptionist whose name appeared on vouchers for 20 trips, testified that she had made only three of them - and that they were to Miami for "sightseeing and shopping." Russell Derrickson, staff director of Powell's panel, denied making any of the 26 trips charged to his name. Odell Clark, the committee's chief investigator, was unable to explain...
...Bomb," an abstracted menace, to be sure, is close as Flanders & Swann come to confronting the sixties; it is not terribly unlike "The Ostrich," in a fable from their own bestiary, who cools his head in the sand while the world goes to the devil. This is not to imply that we world goes to the devil. This is not to imply that we would have them sing to us of Vietnam or MLF or race riots. They are too droll, melodious, and genteel to be militant -- or even engage -- and evenings with them will always have that reassuring quality...