Word: bacharachs
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Forced to grope into theatrical history for an apt comparison, for a composer who was to the mainstream of Broadway music what Bacharach is to that mainstream now, I'd settle on Harold Arlen. Arlen too had a popular bent, wrote songs consciously and expressly for Negro singers, was by nature incapable of the straight, bright, terribly Broadway, Broadway tunes of which any second-rank Cole Porter creation is the perfect example, and on all these counts had to be regarded as an organism slightly foreign to the theatre (Mr. Arlen will of course forgive the laws of parallelism...
...THEY don't positively leap on stage with a hoot and a "Down with Jerry Herman!" sign, Burt Bacharach and Hal David nevertheless make a wicked entrance in the proceedings now on display at the Colonial. Each micro-second of music has the Bacharach-David signature: a souped-up piano, an unseen chorus blowing like the wind over solos and ensemble numbers alike, tunes that demand alternately a whisper and a belt, and lyrics that stick so close to life in its physical and emotional details as to leave no room either for clever allusions or technical bravado. The long...
Predictably enough, it fell to David Merrick to wrap Bacharach and his partner into a Broadway package, complete with a golden property and a golden boy to adapt it. The plan was to take The Apartment, one of the best American movies of the last ten years, and entrust its conversion to the amazingly successful Neil Simon, famous for his four concurrent Broadway hits. But as in all schemes where addition is allowed to pass for logic, there was the danger of the parts not resting snugly with each other, and it is exactly that danger which hits Promises, Promises...
...with a note are strictly soul-derived. Though Do You Know the Way to San Jose? is a sleekly "white", and delightful, song, others, such as Let Me Be Lonely, pay their dues to rhythm & blues. Both songs, along with several others on the album, were written by Burt Bacharach, one of the more able and sophisticated composers in the business...
...ANDREW WILLIAMS' KALEIDOSCOPE COMPANY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Andy Williams takes a musical trip by blending psychedelic lights and today's sound with the help of Guest Stars Ray Charles, The Raelets, Burt Bacharach, Simon and Garfunkel, and Mama Cass Elliott...