Word: comden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Comden & Green, it shouldn't be forgot, were once the bright young sophisticates of Broadway, and sophistication, even when faded with age, simply doesn't become the innocence of a blatantly naive confection like No, No Nanette. Sophistication ages far less gracefully. As writer-performers, Comden and Green have long since been overshadowed by teams like Nichols and May, as lyricists they're a long, long way from the current sophistication of a Stephen Sondheim. Twenty-seven years later, much of the humor of On the Town comes across as simply dumb. Here and there a nice try, perhaps...
...wrong. You've got to give Comden, Green and Bernstein credit for taking on something as contemporary as New York at a time when there were those among the "realists" of the Broadway musical theater who had retreated to beautiful mornings in Oklahoma, dreamy isles in the South Pacific and clambakes in Maine. As musical history, On the Town is fascination, full of echoes of Gershwin (like the oddly operatic opening number, "I Feel Like I'm Not Out of Bed Yet") and campy vulgarizations of Porter (like the lyrics of "I Can Cook Too") as well as premonitions...
Problem is that a year like 1944--the year in which Adolph Green and Betty Comden first appeared in On the Town, a show they had written in collaboration with a young composer by just like any other year. I have a hunch that there must have been a certain schizophrenia in the air. True, the war was on its way to being won, but perhaps underneath the sense of triumph there was also the lurking fear that the best years of many lives had already been lost. They may have danced in the streets the following year when victory...
Sentimentality in Reverse. "The bitch-goddess, success" was a phrase coined by William James. What Mary Orr, who penned the original story, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who scripted the film, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote the book for Applause, have done is to reverse James and produce a clever little parable on the success goddess-bitchiness. It may be clever, but it is far from valid. Cynicism is sentimentality in reverse and equally untrue. Of all places, the theater, with its intense critical scrutiny, verifies the copybook maxim that success must be earned and that only merit will...