Word: loesser
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, Willie Gilbert; music and lyrics by Frank Loesser) is a light, bright spoof of corporate wheels and wiles, and its up-from-window-washer hero, Robert Morse, is a superlative, tousle-haired, triple-jointed comic wonder who could coax laughs out of Mt. Rushmore...
...late, but he learned fast. As a boy on Manhattan's upper West Side, Schuman was totally uninterested in anything long-haired. He had a passing fling with jazz, played the banjo and the violin in a jazz band he formed in high school, and wrote, with Frank Loesser, such pop songs as In Love with the Memory of You. Baseball was his enduring passion: "Had I been a better catcher, I might never have been a musician." His only opera, The Mighty Casey, is about Mudville's heroic slugger...
...Horse (Oct. 6). Milk and Honey, set in Israel and involving American tourists, stars Yiddish Comedienne Molly Picon (Oct. 10). How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying may reveal some of the inner secrets of its director, Abe Burrows, riding a score by Guys and Dolls' Frank Loesser (Oct. 14). Man at the crossroads in Africa is the subject of Kwamina, with score and lyrics by Richard Adler (Damn Yankees) (Oct. 23). Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean, drawn from the life of igth century Tragedian Edmund Kean and set in London's Drury Lane Theater, becomes...
...course, a good reason for the improvement: the commercials were being written by some of the best songwriters in the country (TIME, May 6, 1957) Cole Porter licensed It's Delovely to DeSoto, then Richard Adler (Pajama Game) wrote seductive tunes for Newport and Kent cigarettes. Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls) composed a ditty for Piel Bros. beer...
Before long, Loesser's Frank Music Corp. had the new labor force organized. Admen could buy high-test jingles written by the firm's herd of known and unknown songwriters. Some of the knowns: Adler, Harold Rome (Destry Rides Again), Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (Bye Bye Birdie), and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh (Wildcat). Authorship is not revealed until the tune has been sold. "It's embarrassing," explained the firm's vice president, Stuart Ostrow, "for an important writer to go to bat for Pepsodent and be turned down." Average price, not including sizable royalties...