Word: juling
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Bells Are Ringing (book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Jule Styne), to put first things first, brought Judy Holliday back to Broadway after six years in Hollywood. Moreover, it brought her back-not least because of her own presence in it-in a very likeable show. The Judy Holliday who started her career in nightclubs shines readily in a musical. She can sing or do take-offs of singers and adorn a chorus or dance. In the role of a warmhearted answering-service operator, she can quaver like a beldam or give a rumbling impersonation...
...quite lacks distinction, Bells comes off very nicely at its own Broadway level. Once started, it keeps moving; the tone is gay and good-natured, Jerome Robbins' staging is brisk, the Comden-Green lyrics are sprightly, the Jule Styne tunes are often schmalzy, and now and then rousing. And to put first things last, there is a heaping portion of Judy Holliday...
Peter Pan (by James M. Barrie; music by Mark Charlap and Jule Styne; lyrics by Carolyn Leigh and Betty Comden and Adolph Green) was bound to become a musical in time-and doubtless in time for Mary Martin to play Peter. She looks as boyish as can be expected of any grownup of the opposite sex. She is hard to beat at singing, she can dance, she can duel with Captain Hook; and when she flies through the air, she races and soars and dips like some Peter Pan-American...
Hazel Flagg (book by Ben Hecht; music & lyrics by Jule Styne and Bob Hillard) is generally cheerful, insistently lavish and notably loud. Based on Nothing Sacred, a satiric Ben Hecht movie of the '30s the story tells of a vast fraud: a young Vermont girl pretends to be dying of radium poisoning and yearns for lights and laughter at the end. Hazel Flagg stands forth a creature of breathtaking gallantry, reduces the city to wild and wet-eyed idolatry, inspires everything from prayers to parades...
...commonplace and even oafish; certainly Hazel Flagg uses a maximum of heavy artillery to inflict a minimum of wounds. Once again musicomedy, in the act of satirizing something else, has ended by satirizing itself-by pointing up its own excesses of color, blare, manpower and above all, length. Jule Styne's pounding music suggests a New York that never sleeps, and unconsciously gives the reason why Robert Alton's dances get to be relentlessly, unremittingly lively. If only there were less of everything in Hazel Flagg, it might add up to a great deal more...