Word: rodgerses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
His mother was cultured, his father defiantly not. Max Hart was a round (300-pound!) boisterous sort who did favors for Tammany Hall and, if he was too lazy to go to the bathroom, he'd take a whizz out the dining room window. Lorenz had Papa's appetite for...
Read the words to those tunes - ideally, in "The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart," currently out of print but well worth tracking down. Listen to the songs - ideally, on the 1956 double-album, "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers & Hart Song Book," the most magnif of Ella's eight Verve song...
Written 60 to 80 years ago, mostly for forgotten shows and movies, these bouncy, brittle, worldly and world-weary tunes - "Manhattan," "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," "Where or When," "The Lady Is a Tramp, "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," dozens more - sound both today and timeless. They sing (with confident wit...
The movies give us two glimpses of Hart: both fictional, tantalizing, sad. The better known is an MGM bio-pic, the 1948 "Words and Music," with Tom Drake as Rodgers and Mickey Rooney as Hart. There we learn that Hart was short, agitated, unreliable, full of mischief and misery - and...
The other, weirder film is "Makers of Melody," an early-talkie (1929) short that purports to depict R&Hart's laborious, five-year rise from uptown anonymity to midtown stardom. (An little irony: after shooting the film, R&Hart went to Hollywood, where, with the exception of the buoyant "Love...