Word: hammersteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sound of Music, based on the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical comedy, satisfies nearly all the requirements for what moviemakers tout as wholesome family entertainment. It is tuneful, cheerful and colorful-exquisitely filmed in the Tyrolean Alps of Austria. It celebrates courage-the real-life daring of the Trapp Family Singers, who fled the Nazis in 1938. Though Director Robert Wise has made capital of the show's virtues, he can do little to disguise its faults.' In dialogue, song and story, Music still contains too much sugar, too little spice...
Like all good popular artists, the Beatles have a talent for distilling the moods of their time. Gilbert and Sullivan's frolics limned the pomposities of the Victorian British Empah; Cole Porter's urbanities were wonderful tonics for the hung-over '30s; Rodgers and Hammerstein's ballads reflected the sentiment and seriousness of the World War II era. Today the Beatles' cunning collages piece together scraps of tension between the generations, the loneliness of the dislocated '60s, and the bitter sweets of young love in any age. At the same time, their sensitivity...
...presley was a musical genius what are we to say to Bethevon ? last week a reviewer in the New York Times wrote that "the fecundity of the beatles is a phenomenon unmatched in the history of popular culture." The information may have sorrowed Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cecil B. DeMille...
...Side in and of itself works by taking the opposite approach. The show is professional but low-key, and unpompous narrator Patrick Harris tells anecdotes from the lyricist's life (memorable things Sondheim said, stories from his youth, the tale of his early humiliation by master songwriter Oscar Hammerstein) and then carries over the casual tone into his introductions of the next few songs...
...American tendency to unchecked garrulity is most conspicuous in the realm of TV sports, but it does not begin or end there by a long shout. The late-evening TV news, for example, is aclutter with immaterial chatter. "Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk . . ." Rodgers and Hammerstein offered that lyrical advice to young lovers, but a great many TV news staffers have adopted it as an inviolable rule of tongue. Happy talk is not reprehensible, but should it be force-fed to an audience looking for the news? Surely not, no more than a sports fancier tuning in football...