Word: wynne
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Hooray For What! (book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse; music by Harold Arlen; lyrics by E. Y. Harburg; produced by the Shuberts). Coming after bad advance reports, last-minute cast trouble, and fears that Ed Wynn had been so bad on the radio that he would keep a theatre audience away, Hooray For What! proved to be an ingratiating show, with Comic Wynn just as funny as he used to be. Sometimes the plot shuffled dully between old-fashioned musicomedy and pretentious satire, but it ceases to matter when Ed Wynn comes on. wringing his hands...
...Hooray For What! Wynn is an innocent from Sprinkle, Indiana, who has invented a gas to poison worms. He and the gas are taken to Geneva and used to make a war. If poison gas were a more humorous subject, the play might have been better. On its own or in other surroundings Paul Haakon's "Hero Ballet" might have been brilliant. But it is flat in an Ed Wynn show...
...other hand is Ed Wynn. He complains bitterly about marriage. "You know," he howls, "once a girl proposed to me in a garage, and I couldn't back...
...asked who was his favorite actor. "Ed Wynn," came the prompt reply. And next to him? "My son, Keenan." Who was his favorite after his son? "Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne." Another favorite is Philadelphia. In his show, Ed invents a "brotherly love" gas. He wants to use it on everyone because . . . "then you'll all be like the people in Philadelphia...
Unlike most comedians today, Ed Wynn writes a lot of his own lines. As a "student and analyzer" of humor he has developed his giggle, his high voice, his lisp. The show puts Ed's type of humor in effective contrast with the serious undercurrent of anti-war sentiment. On the one hand, in one act, a score of dazzling chorines dance gracefully with their backs always to the audience. They wear sweeping, transparent costumes. The music plays on, the dance becomes more graceful, the rhythm and movement speed up; finally the climax of the dance is reached and suddenly...