Word: lyricists
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From this body of material, a rather different Seurat emerges from the one we are used to. The "scientific" painter with his abstruse color theories recedes somewhat, and an inspired lyricist comes to the fore -- a 19th century Giorgione. As the art historian Robert L. Herbert puts it in his catalog essay, Seurat "wanted to be perceived as a technician of art, and so he borrowed from science some of the signs of its authority, including regularity and clarity of pattern...
Loesser's output as a Hollywood songwriter, in the years before the composer-lyricist-librettist ganged up on Broadway, needs no revival. It already ornaments every TV late show. Loesser's catchy titles and skewed wit helped lodge many a song in the musical muscle memory of anyone who loves vintage pop: Heart and Soul and Two Sleepy People (music by Hoagy Carmichael), I Don't Want to Walk Without You (Jule Styne), Jingle Jangle Jingle (Joseph Lilley), Hoop-Dee-Doo (Milton DeLugg). And when Loesser began marrying his own music to his words, he hatched even more smashes: What...
Loesser the Hollywood lyricist was Mr. Do-It-All. He wrote torchy stuff for gangster dramas and sarong songs for Dorothy Lamour. When collaborating, Loesser usually devised the lyric first, along with a "dummy tune" to suggest tempo and rhythm. Jimmy McHugh could compose a long, languid melodic line for Let's Get Lost because Loesser had compressed the intensity of new passion into the narrowest meter: "Let's defrost/ In a romantic mist./ Let's get crossed/ Off everybody's list...
...nearly unprecedented role of composer, lyricist and librettist for a Broadway show, Loesser adapted Sidney Howard's 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted, the story of a naive Italian-American grape grower who tricks a pretty waitress into marriage. The result, after five years' work, was The Most Happy Fella, a rich and deeply felt pastiche of popular and operatic vocabularies. If none of its 40-plus songs have quite the lasting power of Guys and Dolls' tunes, the show has an emotive force rare on Broadway; the feeling is big enough to fill an opera stage...
...Heidi Landesman also designed the allegorical, imagistic set, based on a child's toy theater. Director Susan Schulman has laced the narrative with ghosts and wraiths of memory. Composer Lucy Simon blended folk music apt to the Yorkshire locale with art songs fitting the moneyed manor-house setting. Librettist-lyricist Marsha Norman solved the self-containment of the three main characters by making their songs vehicles for thoughts they would never merely speak. Although the creators stress their sensitivity to the book's fans, they were not revisiting childhood pleasures of their own; most remembered the book dimly, and Norman...