This made him only the second man to win two acting Tonys, joining Jose Ferrer. David Wayne was the most celebrated of the three perhaps, the first actor to win a Tony Award for a performance in a musical (for Finian's Rainbow, 1947) at the time of archie and mehitabel he had just won another, for Teahouse of the August Moon. ![]() Carol couldn't match Roz at the box office, but she took the show on a national tour - and I'm told she was quite good in the role. But there she is, a svelte blonde in a black halter-top dress with a ponytail hanging down her back.) Archy was recorded just after Channing returned from touring her diamond-decked Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she proceeded to a tour of Pygmalion, and returned to town for a second recording session just after replacing Rosalind Russell in Wonderful Town. (The small photo on the original LP has been further reduced for the CD, making it hard to make out. This is not the Carol of Dolly Levi, mind you this is a decade earlier, when she was still a slinky-if-larger-than-life siren. This all must have sounded pretty amusing in 1954 (or 1916, originally), but kittens drowning in an ashcan - "I will make a home for the little innocents," says the reluctant mother, "unless of course providence should remove them" - takes on a whole new meaning in our enlightened age. "Why does life have to be one darn litter after another?" she asks to the strains of an ashcan lullaby ("mother dear will be hustling for fishcakes and cream"). In 1953, Kleinsinger turned to archy and mehitabel, working with little-known lyricist Joe Darion (who in 1965 would pen "The Impossible Dream").Ĭarol Channing played mehitabel, the toujours gai alley cat with a past, and she is quite something here. Tubby the Tuba, aimed specifically at the children's market, became iconic. Nothing much happened until four years later when Columbia recorded it on two 10" 78s. He had one major hit to his name, an introduction-to-the-orchestra piece he wrote with Paul Tripp in 1942. George Kleinsinger was what you might call a "symphonic jazz" composer. This seems to have put archy back in the public eye, much as the 1994 publication of Joseph Moncure March's long-out-of-print 1928 poem "The Wild Party" spawned dueling musicals in 2000. But the tales were kept alive and given a boost with the 1950 publication of the anthology "The Lives and Times of archy and mehitabel," with an appreciation by E.B. Marquis published his third book of archy's work in 1935, and died in 1937.Īfter a depression and a world war, archy and mehitabel was somewhat forgotten. The adventures of archy continued long after Marquis left the daily grind, encompassing about 500 pieces in all. "The main question," archy (Marquis) wrote to critics of his style, "is whether the stuff is literature or not.") This wasn't an accidental invention Marquis had difficulty filling the space in his daily column, and archy allowed him to store up copy in advance, for days when he had nothing newsworthy to say. ![]() (Cockroaches can't operate the shift key, hence it was all lower case and without punctuation. Archy, the aforementioned cockroach with the soul of a poet, pecked it out overnight at least, that's what Marquis reported in his column. ![]() One morning in 1916 he entered his office to find a poem stuck in his typewriter. Don Marquis wrote the Sun Dial column in the New York Sun. Ninety bluesy seconds into the twenty-seven-minute saga of the humble cockroach and his feline friend, I was totally hooked, and am pleased to recommend it to people looking for something a little different.ĭifferent it is, that's for sure. I hereby confess that I remembered George Kleinsinger's "back alley opera" only vaguely I recalled liking it, but not enough to bother listening to it again since I don't know when. DRG has brought us archy and mehitabel as one of the titles in its "The Child in All of Us" series.
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