Word: harburger
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...Circus--Not among the Marx Brothers best, but still funnier than anything else around, save their "Night at the Opera." Before this movie is over, Margaret Dumont is shot out of a cannon, and Groucho gets to sing an Arlen-Harburg number about a tattooed lady. At the SYMPHONY II, Huntington at Mass...
Though a few of the Burton Lane songs-notably Old Devil Moon and Look to the Rainbow-are imperishable, most of the score is as withered as the scenario. The few attempts at updating by E. Y. Harburg, who wrote the lyrics, are ludicrous. In 1947 one couplet...
Lyric writing is the art of compression. In two lines, Harburg has encapsulated the ineptitude of the show...
This, on a somewhat less spectacular level, is what one had every right to expect from a Styne-Harburg collaboration. The property--Arnold Bennett's novel Buried Alive--made two successful movies, and there seemed no reason why it couldn't sustain a successful musical too. But Nunnally Johnson, who did the screenplay to the 1943 movie Holy Matrimony, has merely tightened his script a little and introduced a few new scenes in converting it to musical comedy. It isn't enough. Though Holy Matrimony was a charming comedy, its success is in retrospect attributable to the genius...
Just as Johnson's libretto ignores the differences between '40's movies and '60's musicals, Styne and Harburg's songs are ancient in their inspirations. Harburg seems to have completely missed the lyrical revolution epitomized by Frank Loesser's How to Succeed, in which words like "Some irresponsible dress manufacturer" were set to music. The lyrics to Married Alive are still drawn from the same preposterous vocabulary (love, tree, rainbow, etc.) that dominated the worst of Hart and Hammerstein...