I would say, ‘The tune stinks.’ He would say, ‘The lyric is lousy.’ We aimed to please each other.
In his memoir, Dancing in the Dark, Dietz recalls, “We weren’t touchy about criticism.
#Good curtain call song for wizard of oz pop song series#
These guys wrote fast: hired to provide the songs for a radio musical-comedy series called The Gibson Family, they composed 94 numbers in 39 weeks. On the side he wrote Broadway revues with Schwartz, a lawyer with enough spare time to put music to Dietz’s words in the scores of 10 Broadway shows from 1930 to 1937. Like Freed, Dietz worked at MGM he was the studio’s chief publicist, creating the Leo the Lion mascot and the “Ars Gratia Artis” motto. He handed the job to ace scripters Comden and Green, let star Gene Kelly direct it with Stanley Donen and, voilà!, Singin’ in the Rain, widely and wisely considered the best original musical in Hollywood history. Freed hit the jackpot in 1952 when he dusted off the tunes he had written with Herb Nacio Brown in the first years of talking pictures. In his reign as MGM’s musical maestro, from The Wizard of Oz in 1939 through Gigi in 1958, Freed occasionally dipped into the trunks of famous songwriters and turned their legacy of hits into either musical bio-pics - Words and Music (Mickey Rooney as Lorenz Hart and Tom Drake as Richard Rodgers) and Three Little Words (with Astaire as Bert Kalmar and Red Skelton as Harry Ruby) - or new scenarios with old songs, such as Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade. If Arthur Freed, the producer of The Band Wagon at MGM, had seen this version, he would have ordered it and its leading man to get up and dance.
If this revival glides rather than soaring, that’s due not to the performers but to a curious misunderstanding of the source material: that The Band Wagon - intended in both its earlier incarnations as a showcase for the elegant, swellegant Astaire, the most revered dancer of the 20th century - should mostly just stand around and sing. So how it the new show? A fine night at the theater, with Marshall’s bright staging, some clever lines in the Douglas Carter Beane book, a starry cast eager to please, pearly arrangements for Todd Ellison’s 12-piece orchestra and hummable melodies galore (“Dancing in the Dark,” “By Myself,” “New Sun in the Sky,” “Shine on My Shoes”) in the score by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz.
0 kommentar(er)
