Word: lerner
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...bringing something more than a Round Table with him. In the royal train are eight baggage cars full of scenery, more than 200 people, including 46 stagehands, 41 musicians and 56 actors. Above all, he comes with a pair of gifted squires, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, now the best writer-composer team in the American musical theater. Lerner, the librettist, and Loewe, the composer, have already proved themselves worthy of the King. Their last try was My Fair Lady. They also did Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, and the much-Oscared film Gigi. They have now written...
...coincidence, there is a My Fair Ladylike tone to Camelot's credits. Not only did Lerner and Loewe create the play, but Fair Lady's Director Moss Hart signed on again, along with Julie Andrews as Guinevere, Choreographer Hanya Holm, Set Designer Oliver Smith, Conductor Franz Allers. Beyond that, Lerner's libretto is drawn from one of the best novels of the loth and 20th centuries, T. H. White's The Once and Future King. And Arthur himself is arriving in the shape and voice of Wales's and the Old Vic's Richard Burton, who at 34 is numbered...
...Scotland, Spain, or the American West, which has never been more eloquently described in melody than in I Talk to the Trees from Paint Your Wagon. He is sometimes accused of being derivative, but this is rarely the case. Preparing for Wagon, as Singer David Brooks recalls it, Lerner played a record of Ghost Riders in the Sky for Fritz over and over again, then Loewe sent one more ghost into the air and a far better one by writing his superb They Call the Wind Maria. "I never try to write a hit song." he says...
...Lerner's Parsifal. In adapting T. H. White's The Once and Future King the whole glorious frieze of Arthurian legend and the Middle Ages spread by a writer with the rarely combined gifts of levity, scholarship and poetry Lerner and Loewe have unquestionably taken on the greatest and heaviest theme that has ever been attempted in the field of musical comedy (Loewe tried to read the book, did not finish it). Treated seriously, the story could only be a musical tragedy, about a king who loses his wife to his best friend, loses his life under the sword...
...Hart had done with Connecticut Yankee, one method would have been to mock the legend with pure comedy. Others have played it straight an impressive list that includes Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace. Layamon, Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and now Alan Jay Lerner. In Camelot, he necessarily left out some of the legend's great characters: Sir Kay the Seneschal, Tristram and Isolde, Elaine the lily-maid of Astolat, even Sir Galahad, the squarest knight at the Round Table...