Word: caroling
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Through a Microscope. For the past few weeks the emotion of these hard-headed showmen has been echoing all up & down the big middle aisle of show business, proclaiming the ascension of a star named Carol Channing. On Broadway, an authentic new star is almost as rare a phenomenon as it is in the heavens. Perhaps once in a decade a nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to reillumine the whole gaudy legend of show business. In 1938 an impish little brunette named Mary Martin took New York by storm one night when she sang...
...gold-digging Lorelei Lee in the new musical version of Anita Loos's famed bestseller of the '20s, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, strapping (5 ft. 9 in., 153 Ibs.) Carol Channing is ludicrously miscast. Her head, topped by an unruly peroxide burlesque of a flapper's hairdo, seems too small for her generous features. Set insecurely on the top of a columnar neck and broad, sloping shoulders wrapped in the shapeless fashions of two decades ago, it gives her the appearance of an amiable performing seal; and like a seal she seems naively anxious to please...
From that point on, the joke is obvious. Here is no seal clumsily tooting a trumpet and waving a flag in a sawdust ring, but a seal suddenly released into a tank of water -lithe, graceful, confident and effortless. Subtly and with never a false move, Carol's whole expressive body flows with the rhythm of the music. As she sings, every motive in Lorelei's predacious little soul becomes hilariously clear. At the end of her first chorus, both Carol and Lorelei Lee belong to the audience forever. What Author Loos wrote between the lines and accented...
Fabulous Creation. "Happy days are here again," cried the New York Times's scholarly Brooks Atkinson after Carol's Broadway premiére. "Let us call her portrait of the aureate Lee the most fabulous comic creation of this dreary period in history." "Carol Channing," trilled the Herald Tribune's often harsh-voiced Howard Barnes, "serves notice that she has few peers among musical-comedy actresses." Even before these rhadamanthine judgments were pronounced, Carol's out-of-town notices had set the box office of Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater humming with the biggest advance seat...
...Fallen Idol. A brilliant melodrama by Director Carol Reed and Scripter Graham Greene, with a natural performance by Child Actor Bobby Henrey (TIME, April...