Rodgers and Hammerstein were sensational, Gilbert and Sullivan unbeatable, and George and Ira Gershwin a match made in heaven.
But no one-not even Andrew Lloyd Webber himself-has written more hit songs over more decades than Comden and Green, who, after 50 triumphant and oft-tumultuous years together, remain unchallenged as the longest-running act on Broadway.
If you`ve ever hummed ”The Party`s
Over,” ”New York, New York (It`s a Hell of a Town),” ”Make Someone Happy,” ”Never Never Land” or dozens of other standards, you can thank Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the wordsmiths who have helped define-and energize-the great American musical.
If not for Comden and Green, theater audiences never could have relished such classic shows as ”On the Town” (which they wrote with the late Leonard Bernstein, in 1944), ”Wonderful Town” (with Bernstein, 1953), ”Peter Pan” (Jule Styne, 1954), ”Bells Are Ringing” (Styne, 1956), ”On the Twentieth Century” (Cy Coleman, 1978) and many more.
Nor could movie fans have savored such ebullient song-and-dance films as
”On the Town” (with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, 1949), ”Singin` in the Rain” (Kelly, Donald O`Connor, 1952) and ”The Band Wagon” (Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, 1953), among others. Comden and Green wrote lyrics or scripts for all of them.
At the moment though, Comden and Green are knee deep in-what else?-their next musical, with manuscripts, notebooks and other folders scattered before them in their Manhattan studio.
”We think the new show is going ahead-we think we`ve got the money,”
exclaims Comden, 73, with the enthusiasm you might sooner expect of a Broadway baby.
”It`s going to be lavish and marvelous to look at-really terrific,”
adds Green, who turns 75 in December, referring to ”Florenz Ziegfeld Presents Will Rogers,” tentatively scheduled to open next spring on Broadway, possibly at a refurbished Palace Theatre.
”The show is really a celebration of the life of Will Rogers,”
interjects Comden, who has been finishing Green`s sentences (and vice versa)
since 1940, when they first teamed.
Contrary to popular belief, Comden and Green are not-and never have been- married to each other. As show business legends, however, they`re inseparable, and they`ll perform their hit songs at Chicago`s Fairmont Hotel Friday night for the fourth annual Rita Hayworth Gala to benefit the Alzheimer`s Association (phone 312-853-3060 for details).
Adds Green, still pitching fiercely for the new show: ”Our `Will Rogers` musical (with score by Cy Coleman) is going to be big, exciting, with a real feeling of show biz.”
That`s no surprise, since most of Comden and Green`s musicals have ranged from upbeat to downright rambunctious. They hail from an era, after all, when musicals simply were synonymous with grand and uplifting entertainment. Before artists such as composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, director Bob Fosse, songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb and others began to darken and deepen the American musical, Comden and Green were proving it could capture America`s high spirits in a more innocent age.
Era of the musical
Although Comden and Green weren`t the first great creators of the American musical-that distinction belongs to such historic figures as the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and director George Abbott
(who`s still working at age 102)-Comden and Green rank among the last survivors of that happier era.
”That`s probably why our first show was such a big hit,” says Comden, speaking of ”On the Town,” a buoyant, World War II-era musical about three sailors on 24-hour shore leave.
” `On the Town` was probably the last time there was a musical that had both a light story-with a very up, carefree, contemporary feeling-and a big symphonic score (by Bernstein). The two never coincided again.”
Or, as Green once said, ”I think, at its best, (our work is) warm, light-hearted and throwaway, satirical without ever being brutal and rarely slippily sentimental. Never bathetic. And always with a bubble.”
Even after America`s bubble was burst with the social upheaval surrounding the Vietnam War (reflected in such bittersweet musicals as
”Hair” in 1968 and ”Cabaret” in 1966), Comden and Green wouldn`t relent. For better or worse, they clung to high-spirits shows.
But, like the world itself, musicals changed. In the `80s, shows more notable for scenery and spectacular effects than clever lyrics became the rage (consider such British imports as Lloyd Webber`s ”Phantom of the Opera”
and ”Starlight Express”). And all the high-tech effects pushed the cost of staging a musical skyward.
”That`s the trouble: Musicals have gotten too expensive,” says Comden, who knows that it`s virtually impossible to mount a Broadway musical these days for less than $5 million, which is why there aren`t half as many musicals on Broadway today as in Comden and Green`s heyday.
”But don`t think the musical is going to go away,” Green interrupts.
”People still need the musical. It expresses to them the joy of living.”
Adds Comden: ”It always will be around, and you need no further proof of that than what happened to Adolph and me last year. The Hollywood Bowl (Los Angeles` sprawling outdoor amphitheater for summertime entertainment) showed
`Singin` in the Rain` for two nights, and 18,000 people came each night.”
”And they paid a lot of money,” Green adds. ”They acted like it was the first night of the show!”
Lucky break
Clearly, Comden and Green respond to public approval with the same enthusiasm they must have had a half-century ago. Having met after Comden was graduated from New York University, both hoped to become star actors and formed a long-forgotten musical satire group called the Revuers; the cast included a young upstart named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Holliday.
They all were shocked to find, however, that you have to pay money to rent hit songs for performance, so Comden and Green simply started writing their own. After a flopped attempt at Hollywood, the Revuers fell apart, but Comden and Green stuck together.
”To this day I can`t tell you why we did,” Comden says. ”It just sort of happened.”
In 1944, Green`s old Greenwich Village roommate-Leonard Bernstein-hired them for a soon-to-be hit show, ”On the Town.”
”We were lucky on that one,” says Green, who still feels deeply indebted to Bernstein.
”Lenny used to bring people down to the Village Vanguard to see us perform all the time,” Green once said. ”He knew our lyrics better than we did. Some people even mistakenly thought he was our pianist.”
Beyond Bernstein, ”On the Town`s” surefire lineup included choreography by a young Jerome Robbins and direction by the man who virtually invented the Broadway musical, George Abbott.
Although Comden and Green had a massive hit on their hands, they quickly learned the illusory nature of Broadway success when ”Billion Dollar Baby”
(music by Morton Gould) won critical accolades but no audience in 1945 and
”Broadway Bonanza” (music by Saul Chaplin) closed during tryouts in Philadelphia two years later.
”That`s the only time that ever happened to us,” says Comden, still apparently smarting from the wound.
”It was a bitter experience,” she adds, ”but we certainly weren`t going to give up. We went to Hollywood.”
There, Comden and Green scored some of their most enduring successes. Ask any film buff to name the greatest movie musical of all time, and odds are he will cite ”Singin` in the Rain” or ”The Band Wagon,” both of which Comden and Green wrote (using already extant song catalogs at the insistence of MGM). ”We worked so hard in Hollywood that, at the time, we didn`t even realize how gratifying the results were,” says Comden of a Hollywood career that included such endearing musicals as ”Take Me Out to the Ball Game”
(with its glorious ode to baseball, ”O`Brien to Ryan to Goldberg”) and
”The Barkleys of Broadway” (which reteamed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for the first time in 10 years).
”On `Singin` in the Rain` we simply were handed this catalog of songs by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, which we were to build a picture around,” says Green, who once recalled that ” `Singin` in the Rain` we did under duress, because we had a contract. We wanted to give back the money and return to New York. We didn`t see how it would ever work.”
Nevertheless, says Green today, ”we listened to the songs a lot, and suddenly we realized that the songs might be at their best in the period in which they were mainly written-the `20s and `30s.
”So then we started to think of the transition from silent movies to talkies, and then we said to ourselves: `Gee, I think we can do this.` ”
As for ”The Band Wagon,” ”I think it endures because it was a very truthful movie” about a has-been hoofer, Comden says.
”Again, we were given a catalog of songs-this time by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz-and we had to spin a story around it.
”But don`t think working on the film was easy or glamorous. We went to the office every morning, and we struggled and sweated and worked nights and weekends trying to meet deadlines.”
Sheer terror
With the demise of the film musical in the late `50s and early `60s, Comden and Green simply refocused their activities on Broadway (though, even at the peak of their movie activity, they had commuted between the coasts).
”By now, the big film companies had split up, television became big, and the talents to create those great musical films no longer existed at the studios,” Green says.
So Comden and Green went about creating their irrepressibly optimistic shows, many of which-including ”On the Town,” ”Wonderful Town,” ”Bells Are Ringing” and the revue ”Subways Are for Sleeping”-expressed an unabashed love for New York.
These days, Comden and Green acknowledge that New York is a far less sunny place.
”If we wrote a show about New York today, it would have to be somewhat different,” says Comden, who hastens to add, ”But we still live here, so that ought to tell you something.”
One question remains: How did Comden and Green manage to survive as a team for so long?
”We like to say we stayed together through sheer terror,” jokes Comden, who, with Green, also has experienced the inevitable flops, including ”A Doll`s House,” based on Ibsen`s play, and ”Lorelei,” a sequel to
”Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
”But I suppose we have some sort of mental radar that makes it easy and fun to work together,” Comden says.
”People from the outside always think of this as a marriage, but that`s not quite right,” says Comden, whose husband, designer Steven Kyle, died a few years ago; Green is married to actress Phyllis Newman.
”We`re just friends who see each other all the time, work together, get together socially and enjoy socializing with each other`s friends and spouses,” Comden concludes.
”What keeps us going in show business, I suppose, is the feeling that someday we`re going to make it big.”
