Word: broadway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Jerry Ross (real name: Jerold Rosenberg), 29, composer-lyricist who with Richard Adler was Broadway's hottest new songwriting team (Pajama Game, Damn Yankees); of bronchiectasis, a lung ailment; in Manhattan. Since 1950 Ross and Adler, each contributing both words and music, have turned out more than 250 songs. Notable hits: Hernando's Hideaway; Whatever Lola Wants; Hey, There; Heart...
...Hollywood script keeps close to the Broadway book. As the show begins, such assorted knouts, beer-needlers and pete-lousers as Nicely Nicely, Benny Southstreet, Harry the Horse and Angie the Ox are in their customary condition of p.m. panic. "The oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York" is about to sink. Its proprietor, one Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), cannot raise the rent money for a suitably secluded backroom. Happens, however, he runs into Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), a curly wolf at all games of chance, and lays the sucker a G he cannot make it to Havana...
Faithful in detail, the picture is false to the original in its feeling. The Broadway production was as intimate as a hotfoot; the Goldwyn movie takes a blowtorch full of Eastman Color and stereophonic sound to get the same reaction. More specifically, a couple of the principals do not quite deliver. Brando as the gambler has a nylon slickness and the right occupational crimp around the eyes. He dances, too, in one wonderful piece of mambo-jumbo, with a kind of animal rapture that moviegoers will want to see more of but he sings in a faraway tenor that sometimes...
Jean Simmons sings sharp, in a voice that is not much better, but she flings herself into Sarah's saturnalia with a pelvic hullabaloo that should make the public forget about her upper register. Vivian Elaine, the only big name held over from the Broadway cast, is just right as the blonde who celebrates her anniversary (14 years engaged) by catching a cold in her Bronxial tubes; and when she screeches Take Back Your Mink ("to from whence it came"), the evening is made. Frank Sinatra, as Nathan Detroit, not only acts as if he can't tell...
...horse-players as they peruse what Runyon called "the morning bladder." In fact, from first to last-and the last dance is a thrilling choreography, set in a picturesque sewer, of the primordial rite of dice-Michael Kidd has staged his ballets even more effectively than he did on Broadway. Frank Loesser's lyrics are classy, too, whether his music is or not, and Director Joseph Mankiewicz has often made the most of a very good Broadway book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows...