Word: styne
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gypsy (book by Arthur Laurents; music by Jule Styne; direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins) opened to breathless rave reviews. Burbled the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "Best damn musical I've seen in years." Said Brooks Atkinson of the Times: "Most satisfactory musical of the season." The critical fan-farenade for what is, at best, a so-so show would be a puzzler if the answer was not blazoned on the marquee. The answer: Ethel Merman. They all love Ethel, but the love is sorely tested in her latest role as the most monstrous stage mother ever...
...Darling (by Richard and Marian Bissell and Abe Burrows; songs by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green) is a sort of part-time musical made from a book (Say, Darling) that described how a big-time musical was made from a book (7? Cents). This carrying The Pajama Game into extra innings works out fairly agreeably on the whole. Compared to its bookform pokes at show business, Say, Darling is now using a softball. But as a popular-entertainment monkeyshine on the making of musicals, and as the decidedly unspiritual autobiography of a fledgling librettist, the show bumps...
Bells Are Ringing (book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Jule Styne), to put first things first, brought Judy Holliday back to Broadway after six years in Hollywood. Moreover, it brought her back-not least because of her own presence in it-in a very likeable show. The Judy Holliday who started her career in nightclubs shines readily in a musical. She can sing or do take-offs of singers and adorn a chorus or dance. In the role of a warmhearted answering-service operator, she can quaver like a beldam or give a rumbling impersonation...
...quite lacks distinction, Bells comes off very nicely at its own Broadway level. Once started, it keeps moving; the tone is gay and good-natured, Jerome Robbins' staging is brisk, the Comden-Green lyrics are sprightly, the Jule Styne tunes are often schmalzy, and now and then rousing. And to put first things last, there is a heaping portion of Judy Holliday...
Peter Pan (by James M. Barrie; music by Mark Charlap and Jule Styne; lyrics by Carolyn Leigh and Betty Comden and Adolph Green) was bound to become a musical in time-and doubtless in time for Mary Martin to play Peter. She looks as boyish as can be expected of any grownup of the opposite sex. She is hard to beat at singing, she can dance, she can duel with Captain Hook; and when she flies through the air, she races and soars and dips like some Peter Pan-American...