Word: kern
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...Wodehouse's heart was in musical comedy. He was writing lyrics for London's West End in his 20s, and by 1917, five shows featuring his lyrics were playing simultaneously on Broadway. Commuting to the U.S., Wodehouse collaborated with Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter. "Musical comedy was my dish," Wodehouse wrote of those happy days. "I would rather have written Oklahoma! than Hamlet.'" But the real money was in Wooster-shire. After a stream of popular stories about well-born wastrels, among them Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse introduced a valet named Jeeves. He paired...
...uncool it?s almost Republican. (Worse then Republican: most of them would rather listen to Cheney than to Cole Porter.) For them, the Great American Song Book might as well be in Esperanto - a language not worth knowing. Kids don?t think of a standard by Gershwin or Kern or Rodgers as a failed version of a new song. It just isn?t music to them...
...Harold Arlen ("St. Louis Woman," "Bloomer Girl," "House of Flowers") each had three musicals revived, George Gershwin two ("Strike Up the Band," "Pardon My English"). His brother Ira did the lyrics for those and for two other Encores! specials ("Lady in the Dark," "Ziegfeld Follies of 1936"). Jerome Kern ("Sweet Adeline") and Irving Berlin ("Call Me Madam") complete the honor roll of indisputable Broadway royalty...
...Encores! bosom. How about a true faux operetta: "Hollywood Pinafore," George S. Kaufman's tweaking of "H.M.S. Pinafore" into a satire on the movie business? (It ran briefly on Broadway in 1946 and was not heard again until it surfaced six years ago in Discover the Lost Musicals.) Those Kern musicals that McGlinn put in Carnegie Hall nearly 20 years ago: they have beautiful scores and the sort of silly-funny libretti dear to the Encores! audience. Bring 'em back alive! And for a more modern piece, I recommend the 1961 "Kean," with a sumptuous score by Robert Wright...
...excavated treasure was "Pardon My English," a George and Ira Gershwin romp that suffered a chaotic pre-opening rewrite ordeal, closed after a mere 46 performances in 1933 and had not been heard from since. In 1982, music historian Robert Kimball unearthed the score, along with lost work by Kern, Porter and Rodgers, in a warehouse in Secaucus, N.J. (I'm happy to say that TIME deemed the event newsworthy enough for us to do a story on it.) In a program note, Viertel compares the unearthing of this goofy Gershwin farce "to Howard Carter's discovery of King...