Word: vaudevillians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Forbes has used visual caricature for substance, near incompetents for actors, and vaudevillian stunts for wit. And even when he does manage to produce a fairly good scene (one brother trying to do the other in, or hearses racing through a band concert, or Queen Victoria decapitating instead of knighting, for example) there is always a want of directorial style that prevents the scene from being as good as it should...
Leave 'em laughing, the old vaudevillian philosophy, is still the thing along the straw-hat circuit. Some situation comedies chosen for the closing weeks of summer productions...
...strutted a dapper dandy in brownish-grey toupee, cake makeup, Kings Man cologne, suede-and-'gator shoes, jeweled cuff links in the shape of a Jewish Torah, and a wristwatch with the letters of his name in place of the numerals. The watch spelled GEORGE JESSEL. The old vaudevillian briskly filled the President in on the war, assured him that he would waste no time in telling the world about the great job the boys were doing out there, and perhaps even winked a few funny lines at L.B.J. It was darn near R minutes after L before...
...Bones, but isn't. Moreover, there are no quote-marks and no stage directions, and there is no clear distinction made between the two voices by the language itself. Some parts of some songs are in a mad sort of recent Jazzese, the language of the post-vaudevillian Negro entertainer, without the furniture of dialect ("The jane is zoned! No nightspot here, no bar/there no sweet freeway, no premises..."); some of them talk about Henry (which is really the role of "his friend") in ordered, even ornate English: "Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls/where it did much resemble...
Died. William Frawley, 79, character actor, an oldtime vaudevillian who had played in more than 100 movies and Broadway shows before finding instant fame in the '50s as irascible Landlord Fred Mertz in TV's I Love Lucy, where he stayed for all 214 episodes, though he soon found the show "like eating stew every night-stale and not a bit funny"; of a heart attack; in Hollywood...