Word: comden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DREAMING UP a name for a musical revue featuring Betty Comden and Adolf Green singing some of the memorable lyrics they've composed, Doug Schwalbe of the Loeb hit on the happy idea of "A Party with Comden and Green." By an amusing coincidence Comden and Green had chosen this description of their performance back in 1959, when they first put together a retrospective of their songs and show tunes for their own staging. The "Party" of 1959 won an Obie award; the "Party" of last weekend was one of the best given in town this year. Comden and Green...
...Party" culled out of the lyricists' work songs from the deserving famous to those mysteriously vanished into the oubliette of public memory. For the most part, Comden and Green avoid songs made unsingably immortal by the particular stars for whom they were written, choosing instead those in which the thrust lies in the verbal wit, poetics, and/or drama. The variegated chain of musical excerpts didn't always Ring Bells for the audience, but if there wasn't applause at the first line, there infallibly was at the last; the interplay of words, the subtly expressive gesture, the sheer virtuosity...
Betty and Adolf, as they call each other on and off stage, have worked together since 1938, when they began performing with Judy Holliday at a then-obscure club in New York called the Village Vanguard. "It was very haphazard," Comden reminisced backstage last weekend. "We all thought of the Vanguard as a stopgap. We kept on looking for work," Green came in, almost on cue--the two seem to collaborate even on their conversation: "Suddenly all the reviews, all the seven papers there were in the City, started saying great things. People began coming from all over...
Married. Doris Day, 52, freckle-faced band singer of the 1940s turned virgin queen of cinema in the '50s and '60s; and Barry D. Comden, 41, sometime restaurant manager; she for the fourth time, he for the second; in Carmel, Calif...
...Comden, Green and Bernstein have composed no real show-stoppers; but the score of Wonderful Town is, on the whole, eminently respectable...