Word: hammersteins
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...anthology of bad jokes. Add a big brassy orchestra, maybe toss in some snappy choreography to back it up, and even Henny Youngman would make a passable musical comedy lyricist. Or look at it the other way: Take away the Richard Rodgers score, and Oscar Hammerstein would probably come off a lot like Jerry Van Dyke. The conclusion is clear, that in the musical comedy business the first commandment is: Say it with music--or else. Authors and directors who sin against that law too often deserve, at the very least, a long stint in Purgatory...
Sweet Adeline, another nostalgic musical by Kern ad Hammerstein, continues at the Brandeis University Spingold Theater. Curtain at 8:30 p.m., except on Saturday (5 and 9 p.m.) and Sunday (7:30 p.m.), plus a Wednesday matinee at 2:30 p.m. Tickets an extravagant $7.50-$10.50. Besides, you have to go all the way out to Waltham...
...continued to work on larger shows, however. Curiously, he first met librettist-lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II at the funeral of operetta-composer Victor Herbert in 1924, and they decided to work together. Their collaboration yielded Sunny the following year, and, most notably, Show Boat, which will have its 50th birthday next December...
...catch a new production of it at the Barn Theatre in New London, New Hampshire, from July 19 to 31. In the 1927 original, the singing of "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Bill" elevated Helen Morgan to stardom; and it was expressly for her that Kern and Hammerstein wrote Sweet Adeline two years later...
...which the signing-waitress in her father's Hoboken beer-garden, on losing her boyfriend, essays the New York stage and becomes a celebrity, is based to a considerable degree on the actual life of the show's star, Helen Morgan (1900-41), who told Kern and Hammerstein about her early years as a chanteuse in a German-style beer-garden named Adeline's. (A film biography of Morgan's life was made in 1957, starring Ann Blyth and Paul Newman...