Word: hammersteins
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This is a show whose time has come -and long since gone. After a dazzling movie based on Rodgers1 and Hammerstein's 1951 Broadway musical The King and I, the idea of the irascible but lovable monarch of Siam who is tamed by the priggish but lovable English schoolmarm should be retired with honors and prizes. Instead it is being dragged out week after week as an exotic situation comedy...
...trying to figure out whether you're acting more like Tom Ewell in "The Seven-Year Itch" or is it Tony Curtis in "Some Like It Hot," Liz in the infamous white hotpants she wore to last spring's Boston Book Fair, making like June in the Rodgers & Hammerstein lyric...
...lists; melody need not be cacophony or syrup. Sondheim's experiments with sonority may sound tentative to the trained ear, but they are bold charts for himself?and for future composers as well. And his words demonstrate that the great tradition of Broadway songwriting, from Berlin through Porter and Hammerstein, is still alive...
...OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II. Oscar taught me that a song should be like a little one-act play, with an exposition, a development and a conclusion; at the end of the song the character should have moved to a different position from where he was emotionally at the beginning. This was how Hammerstein and Dick Rodgers revolutionized the American theater. I mean, God knows every opera composer dating back to Monteverdi knew about development, but it was never used in the musical theater...
...Hammerstein said that the really difficult word to rhyme is a word like day, because the possibilities are so enormous. One of the things I've learned is that the way to get a laugh in a song is not through the cleverness of the rhyme but by what you're saying. The biggest laugh in Forum is the line in the warriors' song: "I am a parade." That's a brilliant line-and it's not mine, it's Plautus...