Word: hellzapoppin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hellzapoppin (produced by Olsen & Johnson). When Hellzapoppin opened last season the critics muttered a curt No, but the public howled an emphatic Yes, has been howling Yes, Yes, a Thousand Times Yes ever since. When the new Hellzapoppin opened last week, the critics acknowledged themselves licked. They knew they might just as well try to reason with an earthquake or talk back to a cannon...
Since the old Hellzapoppin was played fortissimo, no term exists to express the racket made by the new one. It is all the panics in Wall Street, all the riots in lunatic asylums, all the election nights in Times Square, all the Fourths of July in history, and all the alarm clocks in the world going off at once. But aside from its lustier detonations, it is pretty much the same show. Lena still wanders up & down the aisles calling for Oscar, the little flowerpot whose owner won't claim it still grows by stages into a gigantic tree...
Stripped of its unsurpassable insanity, the new Hellzapoppin, like the old, is the worst kind of ham vaudeville. But, as a tourist once grumbled, "Take away the mountains and the lakes, and what is there to Switzerland...
...meaning. With a leering eye on the box office, it resurrected the Urfaust, that youthful first draft which Goethe himself threw into the wastebasket, and made it the basis for most of the play. To exploit its elephantine slapstick and bawdry, the Everyman sold its own soul to Hellzapoppin: threw in wisecracks about F. D. R., created the impression of medieval monks doing the shag, started a Yale cheer, thought up lines like "Calling all angels." The result was a muddled farce which might well have been titled Getting Goethe's Garter...
...debate in the House of Commons. These sensational developments, however, were made somewhat less exciting by the fact that the pact had been reported ready for signing at least a dozen times before. Indeed, to detached observers the proceedings appeared less like diplomatic negotiations than like the scene in Hellzapoppin, in which a young man promises to escape from a strait jacket in five seconds, threshes fruitlessly around for the rest of the show, and is last seen still trying to get loose, when patrons are leaving the theatre...