Word: comden
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...steers clear of political as well as personal problems in their patter: "Hallelujah Baby, about black-white relations in the U.S., never got an ending, somehow...we had to keep changing it as the front pages changed." Though Comden and Green are to be respected for not indulging in gossip or trying to play up themselves by playing off others, perhaps this matured, mellowed presentation makes their show too smooth, too digestible...
...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...
...spontaneous combustion," Comden says of their composition. Green revealed a little more of the reworking that went into songs that play effortlessly now. "Sometimes you have a great tune. Lenny had this theme: da da dee, da da dum, -- Green picks the tune out on his chair--"and for a long time it was known in New York living rooms, very much to our embarrassment, as da da dee, da da dum. And then we found the phrase: 'Just in time...