Word: styne
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hazel Flagg (book by Ben Hecht; music & lyrics by Jule Styne and Bob Hillard) is generally cheerful, insistently lavish and notably loud. Based on Nothing Sacred, a satiric Ben Hecht movie of the '30s the story tells of a vast fraud: a young Vermont girl pretends to be dying of radium poisoning and yearns for lights and laughter at the end. Hazel Flagg stands forth a creature of breathtaking gallantry, reduces the city to wild and wet-eyed idolatry, inspires everything from prayers to parades...
...commonplace and even oafish; certainly Hazel Flagg uses a maximum of heavy artillery to inflict a minimum of wounds. Once again musicomedy, in the act of satirizing something else, has ended by satirizing itself-by pointing up its own excesses of color, blare, manpower and above all, length. Jule Styne's pounding music suggests a New York that never sleeps, and unconsciously gives the reason why Robert Alton's dances get to be relentlessly, unremittingly lively. If only there were less of everything in Hazel Flagg, it might add up to a great deal more...
...Aisle (music by Jule Styne; lyrics and sketches by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; produced by Arthur Lesser) can smile gratefully at its stars, Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray. Lahr remains among the best of the oldtime funnymen, and there are virtually no new ones. He has a nice comic face, he can make nice comic faces. He has a showman's sixth sense; his antics have authority. Best of all, he can lose his head splendidly when all about him are stodgily keeping theirs. As Captain Universe, leading the Space Patrol in a piece of stupendous interplanetary science fiction...
...mugs and rampages with the embarrassing insistence of a pugnacious drunk whom no one quite dares to lead to the door. For its best moments, The West Point Story depends on talented Dancer Gene Nelson and the pleasant voices of Gordon MacRae and Doris Day in some tuneful Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn songs. As Cagney's girl friend, who all but joins the corps herself, Virginia Mayo fills her tights admirably...