Word: stynes
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...from her name, but Barbra leaves nothing out of Funny Girl. Gags, production numbers, vaudeville mugging and tearstained love scenes receive the same manic stress and fervor. As in the Broadway show, when the jokes are good, Barbra displays the best timing East of Mae West. When Jule Styne's numbers are deserving-People, Don't Rain On My Parade-she warms them with meticulous emotional phrasing until they glow like a marquee...
Musically, Gypsy is a knockout. Jule Styne never before or after wrote a score to compare with it; one suspects lyricist Stephen Sondheim of having contributed measurably to the choice and execution of Gypsy's tunes. And Bob Hoffmann's orchestra does them proud...
Cleverly camouflaged by Vincent Price's remarkable singing voice (which Who's Who sees fit to label "baritone"), the score to Married Alive is a tolerable item. But Jule Styne and E. Y. Harburg, who wrote it, should be capable of better. Harburg's lyrics pale beside Jamaica; for the creator of Finian's Rainbow, they are pure embarrassment. Styne's music is enough to make one suspicious of the authorship of Gypsy and Funny Girl...
This, on a somewhat less spectacular level, is what one had every right to expect from a Styne-Harburg collaboration. The property--Arnold Bennett's novel Buried Alive--made two successful movies, and there seemed no reason why it couldn't sustain a successful musical too. But Nunnally Johnson, who did the screenplay to the 1943 movie Holy Matrimony, has merely tightened his script a little and introduced a few new scenes in converting it to musical comedy. It isn't enough. Though Holy Matrimony was a charming comedy, its success is in retrospect attributable to the genius...
Just as Johnson's libretto ignores the differences between '40's movies and '60's musicals, Styne and Harburg's songs are ancient in their inspirations. Harburg seems to have completely missed the lyrical revolution epitomized by Frank Loesser's How to Succeed, in which words like "Some irresponsible dress manufacturer" were set to music. The lyrics to Married Alive are still drawn from the same preposterous vocabulary (love, tree, rainbow, etc.) that dominated the worst of Hart and Hammerstein...