Word: kaufmans
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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When he began to croon, Lewis Reid of the Morris agency asked Character Actor Irving Kaufman to assume the role. Plump, pink-faced, freckled, balding, Kaufman, who as a small boy once played a spurious Russian midget in vaudeville, has portrayed Lazy Dan for Old English Floor Wax, Happy Jim Parsons for Air Conditioning Training Corp., Johnny Prentiss for Gruen Watch Co. He boasts that he has made more phonograph records than any other singer, having worked for 22 companies under ten different names. On the radio he has played as many as twelve characters in one sketch. But until...
...Haired Boy" has all the car-marks of a good play. Satirizing an author whom the Gallup poll has concluded to be William Saroyan, it's crammed with crack-pot situations that would do justice to "You Can't Take It With You." Only this time it's Mrs. Kaufman along with Charles Martin who are the authors. They say that George sat through the first-night glum as an owl. His wife can make up the situations, but she just doesn't have the lines to go with them. The whole play is strained; at times it gets downright...
George Washington Slept Here (by George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, produced by Sam H. Harris). One of the high comic themes of American life concerns the nervous city people who want to get back to the soil-but not so far back as to avoid rural electrification. To this thesis Kaufman & Hart now devote their practiced wits. Ernest Truex plays the part of a little man who buys a Pennsylvania farm where Washington supposedly bedded (actually it turns out to have been Benedict Arnold). The acid Jean Dixon is his wife, forced among other pastoral ordeals to watch a well...
...stuffy uncle, and there are effective minor players, especially Bobby Readick as a malevolent small boy who is referred to by Mr. Truex as "Huckleberry Capone." But despite the excellent cast, the playwrights' wit fails to explode, merely intermittently sputters. Even Shakespeare came his croppers; presumably Kaufman & Hart are entitled to theirs...
...They have hairy legs and fat fannies and shouldn't be allowed in the yard." This outspoken comment on the social problems of Brattle Street came from Miss Toni Sorel, 1940 contender for the title of number one Oomph Girl of the Nation, and currently appearing in the new Kaufman and Hart comedy "George Washington Slept Here...