Word: arlen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Saratoga (adapted from Edna Ferber's novel Saratoga Trunk; music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) is a gorgeously decked-out period musical, moving from a plush New Orleans in the '80s to a palmy Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The handsome sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton are much the brightest part of the show. Despite some lively Ralph Beaumont dances, some pleasant Harold Arlen music and some neat touches in Morton Da Costa's direction, Saratoga has all the animation of a tableau and all the narrative interest of something written 50 times...
...Arlen score, despite good rhythmic effects, never really gets its beat off the ground. The two or three times the dancing turns lively suggest a last two or three rounds of ammunition desperately fired at the advancing battalions of boredom. Carol Lawrence and Howard Keel are agreeable leads, but to little avail. With none of the succulence of a great big old-fashioned dinner, Saratoga induces all of the somnolence...
...Walters into his brassy Latin Quarter. Diahann was an instant hit, shared top billing with the changeable Christine Jorgensen, who taught Diahann how to bow like a lady ("Darling, like so . . ."). At 19 she drew raves as Ottilie (alias Violet), the naive young girl in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical House of Flowers. She also married the show's casting director, Monte...
...Saratoga has been dressed up by Designer Cecil Beaton, but Morton DaCosta's musical version of Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk does not yet live up to its magnificent settings. With a $1,500,000 advance sale, Saratoga is sure of a long Broadway run, but Harold Arlen's music needs all the help it can get from Singer Carol (West Side Story) Lawrence and Howard (Kiss Me Kate) Keel. The 19th century high jinks between a New Orleans mulatto and a Montana buccaneer bent on robbing some robber barons is "rich in production," reported the Philadelphia...
...more promising book. But though the book of Jamaica, in short, has an idiot simplicity and an almost insolent lack of purpose, it sort of timidly shuffles about between tunes, seldom even daring to let go with gags. Moreover, the book has Lena Horne on every page, and Harold Arlen to turn the page while she is singing one or another of his songs. She is beautiful, and with what elegant sexuality she twists about in tight-curving, fishtail skirts. She is accomplished in a way all her own, seldom raising her voice, never neon-lighting her effects. With equal...