Word: cowardly
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...COMPLETE LYRICS OF COLE PORTER; Knopf; 354 pages; $30 THE LYRICS OF NOëL COWARD; Overlook Press; 418 pages; $25 "Strange how potent cheap music is," wrote Noël Coward about one of his own songs. He was partly right: the melody and rhythm proved irresistible, but the lyric ("Some day I'll find you,/ Moonlight behind you") provided the real power. In an enduring song, notes beguile the ear; words build a home in the mind...
Nowhere is that more apparent than in exemplary collections of lyrics by two of the world's most polished light versifiers, Coward (1899-1973) and his friend and contemporary Cole Porter (1893-1964). The men would seem as different as Piccadilly and Park Avenue. Coward's family took in boarders and lived in London on the edge of genteel poverty. The stage became young Noël's Oxford and Cambridge; he was a professional actor at twelve and England's Neil Simon at 25, when four of his plays ran simultaneously in the West...
...maker of such pastiches has been as acute as Coward, who entirely rewrote Let's Do It for his nightclub act: "Teenagers in jeans do it/ Probably we'll live to see machines do it." But that was merely Noël the singer. There was also Noël the playwright, Noël the actor, Noël the director, Noël the short-story writer, Noël the memoirist and, at the end, Sir Noël, knight of the British Empire. Yet of all his roles, Coward is likely to be remembered...
...genre of the patter song, Sir Noël had no peer. Because he was a performer first, he made certain that his most complex lyrics could be delivered with ease (upon hearing Coward do Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Porter said that it was the first time he had ever heard a song delivered in one breath). Coward's broken rhythms uncannily reflect modern speech, and his rhymes are unpredictable ("The police had to send a squad car/ When Daddy got fried on vodka"). And many of his topics have actually grown more pertinent with age: "Mother requires...
...Jeremy Irons), fortyish, is one such playwright. At the moment he is represented in the West End by a romantic comedy called House of Cards, about an architect who suspects his wife of adultery. Stoppard opens The Real Thing with a scene from House of Cards, a brilliantly brittle Coward parody full of stiff-upper-libido dialogue like "I abhor cliché. It's one of the things that has kept me faithful." As it happens, the two leading players in House of Cards are Henry's wife Charlotte (Christine Baranski) and his friend Max (Kenneth Welsh...