Word: comden
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...director Vincente Minnelli - and the song selection is a canny mix of crowd-pleasing old faves ("Maybe This Time") and slightly more adventurous fare. (Her over-the-top emotionality doesn't overwhelm the delicate "He's Funny That Way," but she pretty much obliterates the intricately ironic lyrics in Comden and Green's "If.") She shines in a medley paying tribute to the Palace Theatre's vaudeville past and proves she hasn't lost much off her fastball in "Cabaret" - only this time, the famously large-living star pronounces, "When I go, I'm not goin' like Elsie...
...nobody, critic or informed amateur, is grousing by the end of the show, when most of the principals join in the 1951 skit-song "Catch Our Act at the Met," by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne. A high-art parody that's up there with Chuck Jones' Daffily Wagnerian "What's Opera, Doc?", the number combines parody, musical virtuosity and about a million laffs. As most every Encores! show does, it sends the audience out of Ciiy Center levitating on a contact high with the best in musical theater. At Encores!, the old shows are always loved...
DIED. Betty Comden, 89, sophisticated, witty wordsmith who, with rumpled collaborator Adolph Green, helped create stage musicals like On the Town, Bells Are Ringing and The Will Rogers Follies and wrote screenplays for such seminal MGM films as Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon; in New York City. Throughout a 60-year career, the pair, who were not married to each other, worked every day, mostly in the living room of Comden's Manhattan apartment, composing stories and lyrics for the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne and seamlessly adapting them to music that ranged from bouncy...
...Sister Eileen," the 1942 hit Broadway comedy about two sisters, intellectual Ruth and blond knockout Eileen, who emigrate from Ohio to a basement flat in Greenwich Village - Ruth looking to be a writer, Eileen with dreams of musical stardom. The musical version, composed by Leonard Bernstein and lyricists Comden and Green, arrived on Broadway in 1953, with Rosalind Russell as Ruth and Edith Adams (later Ernie Kovacs' Edie Adams) as Eileen. The show, which lasted a year, didn't spawn the hits that Bernstein's "On the Town" and "West Side Story" did, but it has tremendous musical...
...could have been slapdash, since Bernstein, Comden and Green had only about five weeks to write the score, after one by Leroy Anderson and Arnold Horwitt was junked. They could do it because they were old pals. They composed the score for "On the Town" in 1944; and in the late 30s, when Comden and Green were starting out in a cabaret quintet called the Revuers, Bernstein occasionally accompanied them on the piano and collaborated on songs. (The troupe also included Judy Tuvim, later the Broadway and movie marvel Judy Holliday.) "Wonderful Town," set in 1935, has many echoes...