VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 123456[7]8910 ]
Subject: Adolph Green, Playwright and Lyricist


Author:
Dies at 87
[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
Date Posted: October 26, 2002 7:38:34 EDT

Adolph Green, the playwright, performer and lyricist who in a six-decade collaboration with Betty Comden was co-author of such hit Broadway musicals as "On the Town," "Wonderful Town" and "Bells Are Ringing" and screenplays for "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon," died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Ms. Comden and Mr. Green wrote the words for much of the Broadway show music written by Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Cy Coleman, André Previn, Morton Gould, Saul Chaplin and Roger Edens. Some of those songs were woven so tightly into the fabric of the musical that they were not readily selected by popular singers and so did not become well known.

Others, however, became standards. They included "Make Someone Happy," "Just in Time," "The Party's Over" and "Never Never Land," with music by Styne; and "New York, New York," "Some Other Time," "Ohio" and "Lucky to Be Me," with music by Bernstein.

In addition to their writing, they performed their own material in nightclubs, on concert stages and on television. They appeared on Broadway in "A Party With Betty Comden and Adolph Green" in 1958 and in the revival, in 1977.

The reviews were effusive, and Brendan Gill, writing in The New Yorker, said that they "have never lost their freshness, and it is plainly their intention, growing older, never to grow old."

In show business, where hyperbole can flow thick and fast to describe successful partnerships neither as enduring nor as productive as theirs, Comden and Green were beyond adjectives; they were in a category that only they occupied. No other team could match their quality and productivity over so many years. They were, as The Chicago Tribune noted in 1990, "unchallenged as the longest-running act on Broadway."

Mr. Green was artistically incomplete without Ms. Comden, and vice versa. They knew it and acknowledged it frequently. "Alone, nothing," Mr. Green once told The Washington Post. "Together, a household word, a legend, Romulus and Remus, Damon and Pythias, Loeb and Leopold — Mr. Words and Miss Words."

Mr. Words and Miss Words were so professionally inseparable, so committed to each other, so pleased to have their relationship and so happy to talk about it, that many people thought they were married. In 1954 a writer for The New York Times mistakenly referred to them as a "husband-wife" writing team.

They were never married and, according to statements they gave to interviewers, never even considered the prospect. Ms. Comden became the wife of a businessman, Steven Kyle, in 1942 (four years after she and Mr. Green embarked on their collaborative effort) and remained so until Mr. Kyle died in 1979. Mr. Green had two unsuccessful marriages before marrying the actress Phyllis Newman in 1960.

Mr. Green is survived by Ms. Newman and by a son, Adam, and a daughter, Amanda, both of Manhattan.

A Match Made on Broadway

Throughout his career, Mr. Green deferred to Ms. Comden and attributed the team's success to her. She was always "unforgivably responsible," he told The New York Herald Tribune in 1961. "She is always on time for everything, while I am late for anything. To make matters worse, she invariably appears at, say, producers' conferences, with our latest work of dialogue or lyrics neatly typed and arranged in readable form." He added that "without directly confronting me with my inadequacies, she has always humiliated me fair to distraction. You see, I have lived for years in the shadow of an overwhelming suspicion that all our collaborations have, in reality, been solo efforts, written in toto by Betty alone — an untenable position for me."

Ms. Comden said she was not the secret to the team's triumphs; they were. "Everything is together," she explained. "We don't divide the work up. We develop a mental radar, bounce lines off each other." She said that she could not envision a life without the collaboration. Years after it all started, she confessed that "we can still be delighted by something the other says or does."

Styne, who was always pleased with the lyrics they wrote for his songs, called Ms. Comden "realistic" and Mr. Green "dreamistic."

Yesterday, Ms. Green said of her partner: "He was brilliant, very funny and knowledgeable on myriad subjects. Certainly music was one of them, but also movies, poetry. He was an intellectual man."

Whoever did what, it was a relationship that the critics began raving about in 1938, shortly after a mutual friend named Judy Tuvim, soon to translate her name from Hebrew to English and become Judy Holliday, suggested that they all form a cabaret act. They did, and called it the Revuers. Because they had no money to pay for words and music, Ms. Comden and Mr. Green created their own, a singular instance in their relationship when they took full responsibility for the music as well as the words.

They opened at the Village Vanguard, a little place downtown owned by Max Gordon (no relation to the Broadway producer of the same name). He did not have a liquor license and felt he needed a little something to entice people to his place, which he saw as one of the last remnants of the Greenwich Village bohemia that had flourished a couple of decades earlier. The Revuers, who included John Frank and Alvin Hammer in addition to Ms. Holliday, Ms. Comden and Mr. Green, opened at the Vanguard in 1939 and, to Gordon's delight, his business flourished and he was delivered from penury.

A frequent visitor to the Vanguard in those days was a young Harvard graduate named Leonard Bernstein. He hung around so much, playing the piano for the Revuers and so obviously enjoying himself, that the customers thought he was Gordon's paid accompanist. There was good reason to believe this, for when the Revuers moved to the Blue Angel, which is what Gordon called his less bohemian place uptown, Bernstein appeared there, too, and pounded the piano with gusto and expertise.

In truth, Bernstein earned not a dime for his performances. He was an old friend of Mr. Green's, having met him at summer camp in 1937. Mr. Green, three years out of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and struggling through the Depression, was trying to be a counselor. Bernstein, in between semesters at Harvard, was the camp's music counselor and undisputed music authority.

Adolph Green was born in the Bronx on Dec. 2, 1914, the son of Daniel and Helen Weiss Green, Hungarian immigrants of modest means. He attended public schools, where he wrote poetry, acted in plays and developed a strong reading habit, which was not reflected in his grades.

He quickly became aware of his estimable ear for music, which enabled him to memorize symphonies, concertos and tone poems, and he whistled them wherever he went.

After graduating from high school, he took to hanging around the theater district, and daydreamed that one day he might make a pretty fair character actor.

He met Ms. Comden while an undergraduate at New York University, majoring in drama. At the time, he was looking for work in a Depression that seemed to have no end. They were part of a group of young people who were interested in the arts, and these associations led to form the Revuers. It was a curious thing about the Revuers: when they worked in one of Gordon's places everyone loved them, but when they were booked elsewhere, as in the Rainbow Room, they bombed. Ms. Comden and Mr. Green began to wonder what would become of them.

They were at the Blue Angel when the Revuers got an offer from 20th Century Fox to appear in "Greenwich Village," a forgettable 1944 film starring Don Ameche and Carmen Miranda. After they got to Hollywood, they found that their parts were atrociously small, and after Mr. Green's part was cut altogether, it seemed a most inauspicious beginning. They worked briefly at the Trocadero nightclub in Hollywood, were not noticed by anybody they wanted to be noticed by, then returned to New York individually.

As the story goes, Mr. Green was despondent as he walked up the ramp alone at Grand Central Terminal; he supposed that all he and Ms. Comden could do was resume working for Gordon. He looked up and saw Ms. Comden, a greeting party of one, holding a hand-lettered sign that said, Adolph Green Fan Club. After that, there could not have been any doubt in his mind that Ms. Comden was quite possibly the best collaborator anybody could have. They adapted that moment later, in their screenplay for "The Band Wagon," in which Fred Astaire played a down-on-his-luck hoofer.

Those Captivating Sailors

They returned to the Blue Angel and were performing there one evening in 1944 when Bernstein dropped by and asked if they would like to help him make a show of the ballet "Fancy Free," which had been choreographed by Jerome Robbins and for which he had only recently written the music.

They had never tackled anything nearly so ambitious, but it would have been foolish to turn him down; they weren't exactly deluged with offers. They developed a stage book, based on an idea of Robbins's, about three young sailors on a 24-hour leave in New York. Their handiwork would ultimately be called "On the Town," and when it opened at the Adelphi Theater during the 1944 Christmas season they were also in the cast.

The show was hailed by the critics, and Comden and Green took off not only as book writers and lyricists, but as performers as well. They would always see themselves as writers, and gave performances over the years only to earn a little money so that they could keep writing. But in this musical, they craftily wrote themselves nice parts: Ms. Comden as Claire de Loon, an anthropologist with an abiding interest in sailors, and Mr. Green as Ozzie, one of the sailors dancing around a city where "the Bronx is up and the Battery's down" and "the people ride in a hole in the ground."

Ms. Comden and Mr. Green quickly began writing more lyrics and books for Broadway musicals, but their first two efforts were not well received. "Billion Dollar Baby" was produced in 1945 but was not a hit. Two years later, back in Hollywood, they wrote the screenplay for "Good News," which starred June Allyson and Peter Lawford in a remake of an old musical about a college football hero (Mr. Lawford). It got reasonable reviews, but did not provide much satisfaction for its writers.

In 1949 they wrote the script for "The Barkleys of Broadway," a movie that reunited Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who had not made a film together in 10 years. That same year, Ms. Comden and Mr. Green wrote the screenplay for the movie version of "On the Town" for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The movie, with Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller and Betty Garrett got good reviews, although Ms. Comden and Mr. Green were appalled that MGM expunged almost all of Bernstein's original score in the belief that it was too high-toned for the average moviegoer. Only "New York, New York" was left relatively intact — the phrase "a hell of a town" was changed to "a wonderful town" — and that was the tune that most people remembered from the movie.

After "On the Town" came an especially productive period, which included the book for the 1953 Fred Astaire movie "The Band Wagon," with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz.

Being Heard on Stage and in Films On Broadway in those years, Comden and Green lyrics were heard in "Two on the Aisle," a Styne musical with Bert Lahr (1951), and the musical version of "My Sister Eileen" called "Wonderful Town," in which they were joined by Bernstein. That 1953 hit starred Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams. The next year they heeded Robbins's call for help and revamped "Peter Pan," contributing "Never Never Land" and "Wendy" and assuring that Mary Martin's return to Broadway for the first time since "South Pacific" would be felicitous (1954).

Two years later they teamed up with Holliday, Styne, Robbins and Bob Fosse for what many theatergoers remember as one of their finest efforts, creating the book and lyrics for "Bells Are Ringing" in 1956. For their old friend Judy Holliday, they polished their particular comic talents — always their strong suit — added some poignancy and wrote such memorable songs as "The Party's Over," "I'm Going Back" and "It's a Perfect Relationship."

Among their other musicals were "Do Re Mi" (1960); "Subways Are for Sleeping" (1961); "On the 20th Century" (1981) and "The Will Rogers Follies" (1991). They also wrote the book for "Applause," the 1970 hit Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical starring their friend Lauren Bacall that was based on the film "All About Eve."

It was not all success; they had their share of flops, too. In 1982, they wrote the book and lyrics for "A Doll's Life," a musical version of what happens to Ibsen's Nora after "A Doll's House." It cost $4 million to produce and closed in four days.

From time to time they would take their comic gifts back to Hollywood. They joined their collaborators from "On the Town" — Kelly, Sinatra, Munshin and Miss Garrett — for "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," an amiable 1949 musical for which they wrote the screenplay and contributed the lyrics. For Kelly and Stanley Donen they supplied the scripts for "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) and "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955). They also wrote the screenplay for "Auntie Mame" (1958), which brought them together again with Rosalind Russell.

Sometimes success did not appear that way at first. "Singin' in the Rain," for example, did not win rave reviews from all quarters when it was originally released. It received only two Academy Award nominations — one for supporting actress (Jean Hagen), the other for its score and songs (mostly the work of Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown; Ms. Comden and Mr. Green wrote the lyrics for one memorable song, "Moses Supposes"). Their screenplay was not mentioned much, although much later critics came to regard the movie as one of the best musicals ever made.

There were times when it seemed that Comden and Green were passé, because taste in show music had changed so, but they stuck to their style and enjoyed several revivals. Mr. Green thought it was dangerous for writers to constantly change with the times. "You have no place in the theater or the arts if that's what you live by," he said in 1991.

Ms. Comden and Mr. Green worked in one or the other's home on a daily basis, even if they had no show in mind, not even an idea for an idea for a show. That perseverance paid off at times, such as when, years ago, they decided they should write some lyrics satirizing how Reader's Digest might compress a great work of literature. They chose Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" and wrote this:

Jean Valjean, no evildoer
Stole some bread 'cause he
was poor.
A detective chased him through
a sewer. The End.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]


[ Contact Forum Admin ]


Forum timezone: GMT-5
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.