Word: weirdly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...produced by Leonard Sillman). The producer of New Faces now offers a jumbled musical revue, a weird melange of good & bad, conscious & unconscious humor. Its chief asset is Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson, 62, colored, who eats four quarts of ice cream daily, holds the world's speed record for running backwards (75 yards in 8.2 seconds) and is the greatest tap dancer in existence. Also easily appreciated is Paul Gerrits, an urbane, roller-skating master of ceremonies, and big, pasty-faced Red Marshall, who serves up vintage burlesque, including a Pullman-car scene entitled Red Rails in the Sunset...
Like earlier New Deal years, 1940 was good for operating utilities, tough for utility holding companies. SEC forced Howard Hopson's weird Associated Gas & Electric into receivership, and watched sick Howard Hopson tremble and snore the year out in a criminal court. In St. Louis, it surprised North American's Union Electric Co. in the embrace of the State Legislature, and helped send its management to jail...
Although Truth or Consequences is close to complete lunacy, it is not quite so close as a weird audience-participation show (as yet unsponsored) called You Sell Me, which floated out from Chicago's WBBM a month ago. Presided over by ebullient, moon-faced Tommie Bartlett (TIME, July 1), You Sell Me is a kind of auction at which anything from a kiss to a shirt is purchased from spectators. Wandering around a WBBM studio with a portable mike, Bartlett haggles over shirts, stockings with holes in them, 1921 nickels. Usual price for such items...
There is the battle of Long Island, like an old panorama print, with Smallwood's line of brown-clad Marylanders saving the routed American forces. There are weird night scenes in the Long Island swamps where the hunted tories hide, the horrors of life in the British prison hulks; the desperate tory defense of Ninety Six, a Virginia outpost. One of the book's best passages describes the long columns of tories stretching from Winchester (far down the Shenandoah Valley) to the Cumberland Gap. Persecuted by the rebels, let down by the British, the homeless loyalists ooze slowly...
...from everywhere; it is as if a hearer were in the midst of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax, it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear of the theatre, all but prances up & down the aisles. The hazy orchestra begins to dissolve, and weird, abstract ripples and filaments begin an unearthly ballet in Technicolor...