Word: comden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Broadway was one fabulous art form. Oklahoma!, cornpone revolutionizer of the musical, was playing nearby, and Carousel was about to open. Kurt Weill, Sigmund Romberg, Cole Porter and Harold Arlen all had new shows. As for the new kids, two of On the Town's creators were 31: Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the co-stars who wrote the show. Two were 26: composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins...
...Comden and Green, who were in the Central Park audience on opening night, know that On the Town is no museum piece. For the 1949 film version, they replaced most of Bernstein's brassy score with more razzmatazzy tunes. But Wolfe has jettisoned Robbins' choreography for dances by Eliot Feld that don't buoy the production; they give it stretch marks. Better to cut these and let the show soar as an all-out musical comedy...
...such, it works terrifically, with faces as new and spirits as fresh as Comden and Green's were in 1944. DeLaria (a Merman crossed with a Midler) and Suber (elegantly, swellegantly hysterical, a Kay Kendall who can sing) remind us of Broadway's continuing lure for talent. Though the musical is a perpetual invalid, kids keep coming to New York wanting to put the show on right here. Where else? When the music's great, the jokes funny, the women sassy and the moon over Central Park gloriously full, New York is once again a helluva town...
Show biz arrived in 1939, when an aspiring actress named Judy Holliday stepped into the club to get out of the rain. Holliday got to talking to Gordon and persuaded him to give her and a couple of pals, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, a showcase for a revue of patter borrowed from the likes of No?l Coward. Last week Comden recalled how her musical-comedy career with Green "all started right here, when someone told us we should be paying royalties, and we belatedly realized we had to write our own stuff...
...KENNEDY CENTER HONORS (CBS, Dec. 26, 9 p.m. EST). Washington's black-tie crowd pays tribute to another passel of show-business greats. This year's honorees are Gregory Peck, Roy Acuff, Broadway and film veterans Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the dancing Nicholas Brothers and choral director Robert Shaw...