#Earthakitt #OneLouder
When New Faces of 1952, a revue celebrating fresh talent, opened on Broadway, the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson stated, "Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary but she can make a song burst into flame."
Orson Welles went further, calling her, "the most exciting woman on earth". He had backed up his opinion by featuring her in a play he produced in the French capital, and is alleged to have had a torrid affair with her some years later. It is easy to understand the impact Kitt had, for there had never been a performer quite like her.
Her lithe, feline movements, the bewitchingly provocative glances from her wide-set eyes and her unique vocal style - girlishly husky with an effective use of vibrato - were truly incomparable. Initially her image was that of a gold-digger, epitomised by such hits as "Just An Old-Fashioned Girl", "Santa Baby" and "I Want to Be Evil", but other best-selling records testify to her versatility - the seductive "Jonny", her wry "Dinner for One Please, James", a vitriolic "The Heel" and, in one of her most persuasive and touching recordings, the pathos of "The Day That the Circus Left Town". Besides stage and cabaret, she also had a film, theatre and television career, delighting a new generation when she played Catwoman in the series Batman.
She was born out of wedlock in 1927 to a white father and a mother who was African American and Cherokee in a small town called North in South Carolina, where miscegenation was deplored. Her parents worked on a cotton farm, and named her Eartha because the harvest was good that year. Abandoned by her father when young, she was later placed with foster parents by her mother, who wanted to get married. She later recalled picking cotton, cooking, gardening and doing other chores to pay for her keep.
The Good Old Days is a BBC television light entertainment program produced by Barney Colehan which ran from 20 July 1953 to 31 December 1983.
It was performed at the Leeds City Varieties and recreated an authentic atmosphere of the Victorian-Edwardian music hall with songs and sketches of the era performed in the style of the original artistes.
The audience dressed in period costume and joined in the singing, especially "Down at the Old Bull and Bush" which closed the show each week. The show was compered throughout it's whole run (except for the first 2 shows) by Leonard Sachs, who introduced the acts from a desk situated at the side of the stage. In the course of its run it featured about 2,000 performers. Each show was up to an hour long.
The orchestra pit was deliberately visible in front of the main stage. The orchestra leader for many years was Bernard Herrmann (not the American film composer, but a flautist and later conductor with the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra).