Word: hammersteins
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...Oscar Hammerstein II, librettist .L.H.D...
...definite challenge to writing jingles. To me, they've become as much a part of the American scene as any native art form." Says Columbia Records' spade-bearded Arranger-Producer Mitch Miller, who has plunged enthusiastically into the new art: "I remember asking Rodgers and Hammerstein how they decided what to put to music, and what to leave to dialogue. They replied that they used music only when it became impossible to convey an' emotional feeling by words alone. The same should apply to commercial musical spots...
Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Cinderella played last week to an audience that, even discounting CBS's inflated guess of 107 million, was probably the largest in the history of entertainment. The show did nothing else to make history, though it made 90 minutes pass prettily and smoothly. Sweet-voiced Julie (My Fair Lady) Andrews fitted the heroine's role as if it were a glass slipper. The hero of the evening was Composer Richard (Oklahoma!, The King and I) Rodgers, who even imitating Richard Rodgers gives a better imitation than anyone else. At least two songs...
...playing between acts, the music even made the commercials fairly tolerable. But it was no cure for Oscar Hammerstein II's script, which kept shifting uneasily between the sentimental and the sophisticated, and making each seem lamer than the other. The modern approach produced a down-to-earth skeptic of a Godmother (Edith Adams) with sequined eyelids and, for a magic wand, a drum major's baton. The attempt at innocent fairy-tale enchantment was sometimes harder to take: one interminable lovers' dialogue consisted of stilted inanities that sounded like a whole musicom-edy's worth...
...until her phone rang at 6 a.m. with the news of her second Oscar. (Her first: in 1944, for the role of Mrs. Anton in Gaslight.) His shaved head glistening like a polished cue ball, Yul Brynner won the best actor award for his autocratic king in Rodgers and Hammerstein's successful cinemusical, The King and I (which took four other Oscars for its technical skill...