Word: harburg
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Cleverly camouflaged by Vincent Price's remarkable singing voice (which Who's Who sees fit to label "baritone"), the score to Married Alive is a tolerable item. But Jule Styne and E. Y. Harburg, who wrote it, should be capable of better. Harburg's lyrics pale beside Jamaica; for the creator of Finian's Rainbow, they are pure embarrassment. Styne's music is enough to make one suspicious of the authorship of Gypsy and Funny Girl...
...music is appealing, exciting, frequently lovely. Even the lyrics (by Yip Harburg, who collaborated on the book) are clever, far better than the dialogue. If the play, which premiered in 1948, usually seems about ten years older than it is, many of its songs, at least, have broken free of time altogether...
...late Ernst Thalmann, Germany's famous Red boss, in 1927. After years of underground work for the Comintern, he announced his disillusionment with Communism in 1942, decided to try for a Socialist seat in West Germany's first Bundestag in 1949. The district Wehner fought, was Hamburg-Harburg, a tough workers' area where the Communists were strong; he beat the Reds hands down, became the tough, unyielding voice of the Socialists' left wing in Parliament...
several Broadway marriage brokers-Librettists Fred Saidy and Henry Myers, Lyricist E. Y. Harburg-trying to unite Aristophanes and Offenbach. Unaware or uninterested that the two are mismated, the matchmakers give their efforts much more sense of ravishment than of matrimony. For plot they have gone to Lysistrata, with its inspired, antiwar idea of having wives lock their bedroom doors to make their husbands lay down their arms. But in production terms that idea has recurrently inspired more bad taste and ponderous bawdry than it was ever worth, and if The Happiest Girl is no more than middling lewd...
Jamaica (music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg; book by Harburg and Fred Saidy) boasts Lena Horne and much that is stylish and charming. Its achievement, to be sure, is more one of atmosphere than of action, of grace than of speed. The humor in Jamaica is covert and glancing; the very hurricanes blow up too fast to be spectacular; even the calypso recalls an island charmer of long...