Word: hammersteins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Oscar Hammerstein deserves a rose crossed with a scallion for his superb lyrics and clumsy adaptation. The Theater Guild deserves a loud cheer for beating the Shuberts at their own forte...
...years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Composer is his equally famed brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, popular song writer (Under the Bamboo Tree, Nobody's Lookin' but the Owl and the Moon), collector and arranger of spirituals, onetime musical director for Oscar Hammerstein, now (at 69) a minor actor in the revival of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The Johnson brothers thought little of their song after finishing it, but Jacksonville children continued to carol it, passed it on to other Negro schools. Since then it has sold half a million copies, exists...
Sunny River (book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; music by Sigmund Romberg; produced by Max Gordon) attempts to revive big-scale, full-throated operetta without knowing how. It seizes on the cobwebs of the oldtime musical instead of the charm. Its lush, long-winded plot, its stilted dialogue, its leering humor have everybody's nostalgia in full retreat before the evening is half over. A tale of New Orleans around 1810, Sunny River tells of the rivalry between a cafe singer (Muriel Angelus) and a society belle (Helen Claire) for a dashing young Creole lawyer (Bob Laurence), runs...
...rest of her numbers manages to do more than her share of scene-stealing. Eleanor Powell, away from the screen for too long, taps and jigs effectively, although she isn't given much to do. These two, aided considerably by some fellows named Kern, Gershwin, and Hammerstein, contribute a hearty portion of sparkling entertainment. The plot--since movies, it seems, must have plots--is bad enough to be annoying, but unobnoxious enough to be ignored. Robert Young struggles to keep it going; the fact that he doesn't succeed doesn't bother anyone, least of all the audience...
...danced and sang her musicomedy way into the arms of an ex-doughboy baritone and the hearts of Manhattan theatergoers. Of no small help to her was the catchy score by Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert's successor and equal, and the lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II. One of their tunes moved the great Critic Percy Hammond to observe: "One song entitled Who? was attractive enough to indicate that ere the snow falls it will be a pest...