Word: lyrically
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...kind of old timers freak show. On the album the duet ("Rain on the Roof") has been cut entirely. Miss d'Orsay gets about one minute of recording time and Ethel Shutta is left to wail her magnificent "Broadway Baby" all alone and with about half of the lyric missing. It all goes by too fast to be appreciated; and the quartet, which really begins to demonstrate what the scope of the show will be for the first time, is missing completely...
...LORENZ HART. Most people think that Hart is one of the two or three best lyric writers this country has ever known. I find him sloppy all the time. His lyrics don't sit on the music properly. When he is just futzing around with words, he doesn't even do it neatly. He misaccents words. One example is in Pal Joey, the line in Take Him: "I know a movie executive/ Who's twice as bright." It's a good joke, but you don't misaccent a word if you want to write...
...just ridiculous. What Oscar knew was that there was music to go with it. The minute that Dick Rodgers' music is added, the whole song has an emotional weight. I really think that Oklahoma! ran seven years on that lyric...
Somehow, between all the landfalls, mini-histories are fitted in-asides about mutinies and scholarly lectures on navigation, on fishing, on map making, on sea chanteys ("Heisa, heisa, vorsa, vorsa, wow, wow," to quote one). The sea turns Morison into a lyric poet who sometimes applies looser moral standards to seamen than to shorebound sinners...
...other is alchemistic. In retributive memory, the playwright squares accounts with the past, attempting to wrest present justice from past injustice. Arthur Miller's The Price is a perfect example. In alchemistic drama, the goal is to transmute the heavy base metals of the past into present lyric gold, as Tennessee Williams did in The Glass Menagerie. Generally speaking, the main thrust of retributive drama is moral, and that of alchemistic drama is aesthetic...