Word: slang
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stays interesting. But somehow it never becomes as powerful or haunting as might be expected from the combination of this author and these themes. The old O'Neill faults, on the other hand, are much in evidence: the play is rambling, uneven, unfocussed, and couched largely in outdated slang...
...might have been the Winter Garden in 1935. The girls drifted languidly down an outsized ramp while the music came pumping out of the pit like an echo from a Ziegfeld revue. A couple whisked onstage to do a comic turn, punctuated with the oddly archaic slang of the hepcat: "Hey, baby! Let's have a ball!" Occasion : the Manhattan opening of Japan's all-girl Takarazuka Dance Theater, an amalgam of the Folies-Bergere, the Radio City Rockettes, and native Kabuki styles...
Dobie methodically woos her and the others (15 others) with slang of every vintage-words and phrases which, in the imagination of Author Shulman, ricochet along high school corridors in 1959. Dobie starts out safely enough, tells what "bugs" him, what's "a gasser," who's "kooky" and "all that jazz." But in no time at all, the gassers have become "marvy," the jazz is "jive," and people start "yacking away." An echo from the past informs everyone to "stay loose." Another, from the Dark Ages, adds...
Died. James Gleason, 72, wispy, slang-spouting cinemactor who inevitably turned up as the prizefight manager, the private eye, the top sergeant or the political crony in scores of films, from Here Comes Mr. Jordan to The Last Hurrah, onetime Broadway playwright who hit the big time in 1925 with Is Zat So? (618 performances), later wrote plays with fat cast lists in order to provide work for actors; of chronic asthma; in Hollywood...
...enjoy them. Waiting for Lefty is not much over twenty years old, but already it appears naive, not to say puerile; its melodramatic politics, so characteristic of the time (coarse, pravdaically fiendish big-business villains and oppressed but upright working-class heroes) is as dated as its slang. The "Solidarity Forever" day of leftist-labor idealism are over; people who were part of them seldom like to talk about them, even before Congressional committees. In 1959 Clifford Odets' play about striking taxi drivers deserves attention largely as an amusing, nostalgic period piece...