Word: comden
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cabaret humor is apt to be as brittle as a glass swizzle stick. Moved to the big, turbulent Broadway stage, it usually breaks. But two expert swizzlers have managed the transfer: Betty Comden and Adolph Green. They started in the '30s, in Manhattan's satirical cellar nightclubs, but eventually the two brightest kids underground emerged above ground as two of the sharpest adults writing musicomedy (book and lyrics for Two on the Aisle, On the Town, Billion Dollar Baby). This season Comden and Green are more visible than ever, with two flourishing Broadway shows-Say, Darling, Bells...
...Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a nostalgic anthology of their own works, is anything but elaborate: three stools for props, a couple of quick dress changes for Betty, one shirt switch for Adolph. What makes the show remarkable is that chic, cleancut Betty, 39, and fast, Fernandel-faced Adolph, 43, are not one wit changed from their cellar years...
...Darling (by Richard and Marian Bissell and Abe Burrows; songs by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green) is a sort of part-time musical made from a book (Say, Darling) that described how a big-time musical was made from a book (7? Cents). This carrying The Pajama Game into extra innings works out fairly agreeably on the whole. Compared to its bookform pokes at show business, Say, Darling is now using a softball. But as a popular-entertainment monkeyshine on the making of musicals, and as the decidedly unspiritual autobiography of a fledgling librettist, the show bumps...
...falls in love at first hearing. The love story of Bells Are Ringing is almost defiantly orthodox, but suffused as it is with Judy's warmth, never really becomes a burden. But it does bulk much too large for wit to keep pace with sentiment, for the Comden-Green book to display the usual fresh, crisp Comden-Greenness...
...quite lacks distinction, Bells comes off very nicely at its own Broadway level. Once started, it keeps moving; the tone is gay and good-natured, Jerome Robbins' staging is brisk, the Comden-Green lyrics are sprightly, the Jule Styne tunes are often schmalzy, and now and then rousing. And to put first things last, there is a heaping portion of Judy Holliday...