Word: broadways
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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 and the short of it is that they're new (at least in the romantic world of Broadway success stories where writing the finest popular songs of the day counts for nothing), they're different, and they're here...
...have-authority. I can't even get a waiter in a restaurant." Pleasence considers Goldman one of his three best performances-the other two being Davies in Pinter's The Caretaker ("I had the image of an alley cat in mind") and the title role in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh's Poor Bitos...
...toucan, is back in the musical that made her a household bird. She may have omitted an a from her name, but Barbra leaves nothing out of Funny Girl. Gags, production numbers, vaudeville mugging and tearstained love scenes receive the same manic stress and fervor. As in the Broadway show, when the jokes are good, Barbra displays the best timing East of Mae West. When Jule Styne's numbers are deserving-People, Don't Rain On My Parade-she warms them with meticulous emotional phrasing until they glow like a marquee...
Otherwise, this extended Streisand Special has done absolutely nothing to correct the flaws in the Broadway original. This popcornball backstage biography of Fanny Brice still contains lines out of the Late Show: "You're no chorus girl, you're a singer." "I love to hear an audience applaud, but you can't take an audience home with you." "I can't go-not like this." As Nick Arnstein, Fanny's hard-luck gambler husband, Omar Sharif, of all people, is only required to stand and listen with large liquid eyes. The rest of the cast...