Word: hammersteins
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Little Mary Sunshine. Despite a title that would embarrass Oscar Hammerstein. the show is redeemingly satirical, has turned into one of the most surprising phenomena in off-Broadway history. Running since last autumn to capacity audiences, Little Mary is sold out till the end of the month, plays to theater parties and matinees in an enlarged seating capacity (from 199 to 299 seats), has its own "original cast" album (Capitol...
Music for a Spring Night (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Trying to give winter the brush-off some three weeks early, ABC introduces its new musical series. The first installment, The Sound of Spring, taps Debussy, Stravinsky, Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein, stars Bill Hayes, Betty Johnson, the Metropolitan Opera's Rosalind Elias...
...written perky ditties and part songs for children, a lilting quartet for nuns, nice music for folk dancing, nice music for lovemaking, a swelling processional, a kind of hallelujah chorus. But, in general, the show's virtues are marred by its weaknesses. For one thing, Rodgers and Hammerstein do repeat themselves: governess, children and children's papa seem at moments the twins of The King and I. And The Sound of Music suffers badly by comparison, has less swing, less gaiety, less piquancy, less the very air of musicomedy...
...Sound of Music-with Richard Rodgers supplying the music, Oscar Hammerstein the lyrics, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse the libretto, and with Mary Martin as the star-provides "What's in a name?" with at least one answer: "A $2,325,000 advance sale.'' The show itself, in accordance with Rodgers and Hammerstein's desire not to repeat themselves, goes to Austria at the time of the Anschluss for its story, to the famous Trapp Family Singers, who dramatically escaped from the Nazis' clutches. Besides Captain Georg von Trapp, there were his seven children...
There is probably no way to prove that the people who like J.B. are the same ones who read Time Magazine every week, laugh at all of Schlesinger's jokes, find themselves existentially challenged by Reverend But-trick's sermons, own stacks of Rodgers and Hammerstein records, and think James Gould Cozzens should have gotten the Nobel Prize, but one would like to believe it. If only all the forms of intellectual laziness and disinfected passion were some-how congruent, the Enemy would be more clearly defined, easier both to see and to grapple with. But, alas, what Dwight MacDonald...