Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Charles LeMaire, 88, designer of glittering, sumptuous costumes for Hollywood films from 1943 to 1960 and, before that, for more than 60 Broadway shows, including the '20s extravaganzas of Florenz Ziegfeld; in Palm Springs, Calif. After successfully campaigning for an Oscar category in costume design (it started in 1948), he was nominated 16 times and won for All About Eve (1950), The Robe (1953) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing...
Unlike many Broadway composers of Kern's day who scrambled to success out of tenements on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he was born in a comfortable midtown apartment, the son of a German-Jewish stabler. Young Jerry would never be the businessman his father hoped for. Sent out to purchase two pianos, the lad returned with 200. But he must have known his future would have more to do with sitting at pianos than haggling over them. He spent his 17th birthday attending a community-theater premiere of his own musical, a parody of Uncle Tom's Cabin...
...period of Kern's "Princess Theater musicals," written with Wodehouse (pre-Jeeves) and Bolton. At a time when Continental operettas were all the rage, these "midget musical comedies" -- airy, brash and daringly American -- created a theatrical revolution to a ragtime beat. They set the tone and tempo on Broadway for the next decade and beyond. When the style changed, it was again Kern who reshaped it, along with Oscar Hammerstein II. Their 1927 Show Boat, with its sweeping seriousness and its near operatic transformation of blues and folk music, paved the Great White Way for Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma...
...characters like those so affectionately evoked in The Front Page: raffish, even loutish, prone to sensationalism and cheap sentiment, but also truthful, keenly professional and dedicated to exposing wrongdoing in high places. Reporters have delighted in seeing themselves depicted as figures of quixotic integrity in plays ranging from the Broadway musical Woman of the Year to Tom Stoppard's rueful tragicomedy Night and Day. But the current wave of antipress feeling in the U.S. may have spread to Britain as well. Audiences at London's National Theater, which in 1972 staged an acclaimed revival of The Front Page, are cheering...
...newspapers that might be. The play is not foremost a preachment, however, but a superb high-energy entertainment, with a cast of 33, lavishly detailed sets, throbbing music and an urgent, propulsive style set by Co-Author Hare, who directed. It recalls the morally assertive best of warmhearted Broadway satires like The Solid Gold Cadillac in every regard save one: Pravda does not and, given its bitter convictions, could not have a happy ending...