Word: hartness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Your Toes (music & lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart; book by Rodgers, Hart and George Abbott) is a good deal oftener on its uppers. The musical that in 1936 really put jazz ballet on Broadway, On Your Toes was perhaps from the start pretty much all thumbs where it wasn't nifty footwork. Time has tended to merge the show and the ballet into one, but they are scarcely more alike than Buffalo and Niagara Falls...
There are very nice songs like There's a Small Hotel, but Rodgers gave the show a ballet rather than top-drawer show music, and Hart gave it lyrics that tend to shout their cleverness. It is the Rodgers-Hart-Abbott libretto, however, that lays a curse upon the evening-the look, if ever there was one, of three men on an elephant...
...dozen big musical sequences, makes Star a mighty long gulp of champagne; but, like champagne, it is hard to refuse. Simply in the writing, for instance, there is a sureness rare in musicomedy librettos-and no wonder: Poetess Dorothy Parker worked on the 1937 script, and Playwright Moss Hart had that to draw on for this one. There is some fine Hollywood off-camera stuff: the great star being fastidious about his amours ("Too young. I had a very young week last week"); the little nobody taking her screen test ("Cut!" the director bellows in horror, "we saw your face...
Thomas R. Hart, Jr., Instructor in Romance Languages and Literatures, was worried that Radcliffe and Harvard students, used to leading, a soft life with no afternoon or weekend classes, might "wander" into class at 8:15, thereby missing part of the exam...
Second Spec. At week's end, NBC gamely presented its second spectacular, a TV version of the 1941 Moss Hart musical, Lady in the Dark, starring Ann Sothern. Just like the first spectacular, it was big, beautiful and contained too many production numbers. There was such a quantity of large-scale scenes that the camera could take only a few closeups during the 1½-hour show and many viewers may have felt that they were watching the entire production through the wrong end of a telescope...