Word: lyricist
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TIME has posed that question about many runaway hits and hitmakers over the years. We asked it of Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who appeared on our cover in 1947, when he and his partner, Composer Richard Rodgers, had five shows, including their musicals Oklahoma! and Allegro, playing on Broadway. (For all his popularity, Hammerstein had a yearly income of $500,000 -- roughly half of Lloyd Webber's present monthly royalties.) We wrote then that Hammerstein's words "carry a gentle insight and a sentimental catch in the throat to millions of people who are only dimly aware of his name." Within...
...principal lyricist, Lloyd Webber chose Charles Hart, 26, a novice who had only one previous, unperformed musical to his credit; in counterbalance, the composer tapped the veteran director Hal Prince, 59, who * had contributed so much to the success of Evita. Lloyd Webber composed the role of Christine with his wife Sarah Brightman's crystalline voice and fragile Pre-Raphaelite looks in mind. The trick was casting the Opera Ghost. His choice was British Actor Michael Crawford, 45, whom he had heard sing in the 1979 London show Flowers for Algernon and who had appeared in such films...
...head-over-heels devotion to Maria for West Side Story, the anthem to unrequited passion, Losing My Mind, for Follies and the rueful look at love out of synch, Send In the Clowns, for A Little Night Music. Each of the 14 shows for which he has been composer, lyricist or both has been shot through with emotion. His latest, Into the Woods, which opened last month and promptly became Broadway's newest musical hit, with advance sales climbing to $2.5 million, embraces every experience from birth to death, from delirious infatuation to parting regret. Yet to acerbic critics...
...couple of years after the divorce, however, Sondheim's mother made a doting gesture that transformed his life. Stephen, then 12, had made a new friend named Jamie Hammerstein, son of Oscar, the lyricist of Very Warm for May, and was invited to the family farm in Doylestown, Pa., for a weekend. The weekend turned into a summer and, not long after, Mrs. Sondheim bought a house in Doylestown so Stephen could live there year-round. She continued to commute to Manhattan, often stayed there during the week and on weekends typically brought along guests. But as Jamie Hammerstein recalls...
Into the Woods cannot change the situation by itself or even by example. For one thing, imitation is a less viable route to success in the theater than in prime-time TV. For another, only Sondheim is Sondheim. Says Composer- Lyricist Jerry Herman, author of La Cage aux Folles and Hello, Dolly: "We would all agree that Steve is the genius of the group, the one who keeps on taking the musical theater to new places." What Into the Woods does, gloriously, is make the case for what musicals might be, blending innovation and old-fashioned storytelling into an elixir...