Word: vaudevillian
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Simple Notion. The son of a retired Baptist minister, Stan Freberg began to learn the tricks of beguiling an audience when he was only eleven. His uncle was Conray the Magician, and young Stan served as "coat stuffer" for that old vaudevillian. By 1955 Freberg was well established as a minor comic in TV and a far-out satirist on records. His liveliest: a drama of passion whose only dialogue consisted of the words "John" and "Marsha"; St. George and the Dragonet, a take-off on Jack Webb's Dragnet, which sold 1,000,000 records in three weeks...
...months they had suspected that he was something more. "I've seen the act in vaudeville," said awed ex-Vaudevillian Charley Foy. "It's two guys on roller skates." Chimed in a breed-improver named Georgie Jessel: "His name isn't Sullivan at all. He's Silky Solomon. I knew him in Philadelphia...
...knickknacks, of interpolated flourishes and roulades: a trio practicing orchid-eating, a wild snatch of Swan Lake, a bit of supper ritual, a quite mad hunting scene. As the flighty duchess, Helen Hayes -if not wholly French-is very often wholly delightful, alternating an actress' skill with a vaudevillian's liveliness. Richard Burton plays a prince who is more bored than bereaved with a fine sullen dash; and his verbal aria on how sad it is to be rich is far more piquant than anything of Saroyan's on how jolly it is to be poor. Susan...
...replays of records Louis cut between '23 and '34, some of them amplified by the famous, gravelly Armstrong voice. The album is marred by a hackneyed script, read by Satchmo, but it should give latter-day jazz fans, who know him only as the aging vaudevillian, an idea of what the shouting was about...
...Ritchard. As a highly flexible Superman of the arts, big (6 ft. 2 in., 194 Ibs.), urbane Cyril Ritchard is also the fey earth visitor (and director) of Broadway's hit play A Visit to a Small Planet, a sort of personal gilly for his neat bag of vaudevillian's tricks. This spring, between performances, he made flying trips cross-country to play the leading comedy role in the Metropolitan Opera's Gilbert-and-Sullivanish souffle, La Périchole, which he also staged. "I sound like a sick walrus when I'm in good voice...