Word: hammerstein
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Carousel (20th Century-Fox). In the years between the wars, European audiences licked their lips over Liliom, the play by Ferenc Molnar. What they liked about its flavor was the salt. U.S. theater goers did the same over Carousel, the musical that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made from the play in 1945, but what they liked about its flavor was the sugar-the pretty pink icing of the plot, and most of all the sunny flowing honey of the lovely Rodgers tunes. The melodies have all their clovered freshness still, but if film fans lick their lips over anything...
...cast and the Rodgers and Hammerstein score overcome the frequently distracting photography, the travelogue scenery, and some distractingly phony sets, to carry the plot forward. The photography can be helpful in the large scenes like the clambake or in the choreography numbers. But when MacRae sings the Soliloquy he is lost, if not drowned, in the midst of miles of surf, sand, and rock formations...
Carousel, by that unfortunate pair, Rogers & Hammerstein, has been further garished by "Cinemascope 55." Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, and starring Mary Breen. More than your eyes have ever seen! Keith's Memorial...
Pipe Dream (music by Richard Rodgers; book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II). Always anxious not to repeat themselves, Rodgers & Hammerstein have turned in Pipe Dream to the flophouse and bordello set of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. When not cavorting, the bims and bums heave and push at a constantly stalled romance between a popular young scientist and a pretty waif befriended by a madam. To get Doc a microscope, Cannery Row stages a raffle and fancy-dress brawl, and when the lovelorn heroine takes up despairing residence inside a boiler, they have at the lovelorn hero to fetch...
Seldom truly raffish, the show is often just plain dull. There are some attractive Hammerstein lyrics, and the Rodgers score ranges pleasantly from the lilt of A Lopsided Bus to the schmalz of All at Once You Love Her. But the production adds little gloss: the dancing is uninspired, the performing?except for William Johnson as Doc?unimpressive. TV's Judy Tyler is little more than a pretty ingenue, and as the madam, Opera Singer Helen Traubel is wildly though likably miscast...