Word: lyricists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...after repeatedly telling them it shouldn't matter. Curiously, Smile works. It is a swift-paced, skillfully performed and thoroughly professional entertainment that balances amusement at the shallow ambitions of the characters with respect for the depth of their feelings. Composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and Author-Lyricist Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors) have written touching songs for the stars, Anne Marie Bobby as a sweet, awkward A student who realizes she is out of her element at the pageant and Jodi Benson as a wanderer who is prematurely wise in the ways of selling herself, including...
...musical, its foremost contribution to the world theater, has typically been seen as a straightforward comic romance that sends audiences out grinning and humming. But in an intensely imaginative 13-show career, Stephen Sondheim has embraced all those unpromising themes. From his big-time debut in 1957 as the lyricist of West Side Story to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, a fantasy about the creation of a French impressionist painting, Sondheim, 56, has steadily pushed toward--or beyond--the limits of what the score, the narrative, the very premise of a musical...
...eons, the frozen north was terra incognita, the work of a mapmaker's imagination. Now it is the turn of writers to define its contours. The latest lyricist is Journalist Barry Lopez. "Much of the tundra," he notes, "appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees--a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realize suddenly that you are wandering around on top of a forest." Icebergs the size of Cleveland drift through the dark waters, and sulfur butterflies mysteriously rise in the short, delirious summer. Mirages provide a weird history...
Jerry Herman, who built his reputation as the composer and lyricist of Hello, Dolly and Mame, argues that in the theater, "the strongest single force you could have is a larger-than-life lady on the stage." That chivalric premise is supported by two current Broadway delights, Bernadette Peters' act-long vocal solo in Song & Dance and Lily Tomlin's one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. The same nothing-like-a-dame thinking underlies Jerry's Girls, a retrospective pastiche of Herman's work, featuring Dorothy Loudon, Leslie Uggams, Chita Rivera and eight...
...eighth annual Kennedy Center gala in Washington, the honorees--avant- garde Choreographer Merce Cunningham, 66, Actress Irene Dunne, 81, Comedian Bob Hope, 82, Playwright-Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, 67, Composer Frederick Loewe, 84, and opera's Beverly Sills, 56--were wined and dined for two days, but not quite as usual. Cunningham, "the non sequitur of the evening," said his publicist, was served special macrobiotic dinners. And Dunne, disappointedly, was unable to attend the grand finale after back-pain medication made her ill. Hospitalized, she sent word that "the show should go on," and that it did, in a star...