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No attempt was made at formalized presentation. The performers were all piled together simultaneously on the stage in a crowded mishmash. From the group—who constantly got in each other's way as they picked their way to center stage—a "femcee" named Sunshine Sue called them for their turns. (I will accept Sunshine Sue but I gag at "femcee.") With proper routining and scenes and a variety of sketches and comedy monologues to provide a change of pace from singing—and if the singers and musicians and comedians are directed by a director who knows the difference between a town square where some loafers congregate and a stage—and if the material is cast in a revue pattern, I believe that a program of hillbilly music could entertain New York playgoers. There were moments in "Hayride" when pure talent overcame all the obstacles of a cold audience and a stupid management.
It happened when Daniel L. Pennell, who works under the sideshow name of Zag, the Ozark Mountain Boy, strummed a guitar and sang such pornographic cantatas as "Vegetable Love" and "Don't Do That to Me." He also delivered himself of a magnificently exuberant version of "Jambalaya." Zag is a queer looking chap with hunched-up shoulders and a hebephrenic smile. As he chants, he abandons himself to the rhythm and weaves about almost insanely, shuffling his legs wildly and twisting his abdomen to and fro. I have not seen such interesting sex gyrations since James Dean, the Arab boy in "The Immoralist," attempted to work his wiles on Louis Jourdan.
It also happened when Joe Maphis and Cousin Rose sang "Cock-a-doodle-e-doo I'm the rooster, Cluck-cluck-cluck I'm the hen." Like Zag, Maphis has a flair for projecting a quality of magic from a stage, completing a circuit between himself and an audience. I must also mention a trio known as the Coon Creek Girls from Pinch-Em-Tight-Holler, Kentucky. One of the girls absolutely hypnotized me. She was a detached, pretty girl, a sort of Ophelia, with raven-black hair, and she had the same hebephrenic smile and seemed to be staring off into space as she stroked a bull fiddle with a stiffy curved right hand.
In a way, it is a neat symbolism that the season should have been opened with a form of entertainment that is |
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