COMEDY HARMONISTS

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20911, 16 September 1939, Page 15 (Supplement)

COMEDY HARMONISTS

SYDNEY AUDIENCES DELIGHTED DRAWING HUGE CROWDS The matinee drew a vast crowd to the Town Hall and found the Comedy Harmonists in top form, says a Sydnev paper. From musical buffoonery to music straight, these amazingly clever singers made their way with the technique of assured musicians and (as was frequently called for) a sense of abandonment and grotesque humour. The personnel is unchanged: Hans Rexeis and Erich Collin, two good tenors; Roman Cycowski, the baritone with the pleasing tone and singing style; and Rudolf Mayreder, the sonorous bass. Comedian Harry Frommerman is an industrious master of the revels, never failing to excite laughter with his frequent and clever simulation of the accents of a semi-strangulated cockerel. or a saxophone gone wrong. These effects contributed very tellingly to the amusing ensemble. “Mein Onkel Bomba.” The psuedo-Spanish “Pepita” was another great success as a piece of genuine burlesque. Spirited Pianist But the Harmonists can do much better than that, as they showed by extracting musical value from Cole Porter’s treacly, sentimental “Night and Day.” And. better still, in the romance and refined music of Dumas’s “Corsican Barcarolle” and in the Waltz in A Flat of Brahms. All this work was advantaged by the* spirited accompaniments of Fritz Kramer. That their fame as imitators of orchestral playing is well deserved the Harmonists proved once again with a diverting and enormously clever; “performance” of the Fritz von Suppe overture, “Poet and Peasant.”

Nineteen-year-old Virginia Gilmore is being groomed for stardom at Goldwyn studios. There is even a clause in her contract to prohibit her from engaging in any activities intended to “change her personality.”