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A TELENT TO AMUSE REMEMBERING ADOLPH GREEN | by Kenneth Jones His friends and family all called him an eccentric, a goof and a character, but the casual fun of musical theatre might have thought, from listening to his best-known songs, that lyricist-librettist Adolph Green, who died at age 87 on Oct. 24, 2002, was all about plaintive sincerity. "The Party's Over,", "Make Someone Happy" and "Just in Time," arguably his most popular songs - all with composer Jule Styne and co-lyricist Betty Comden - were simple, elegant and reserved. These from the mind of a nut? In fact, the Bronx-born Green's resume is a mini-history of Broadway and film musicals. Green and Comden were acting and writing partners starting in 1938 in a comedy troupe, The Revuers, which included their pal, July Holliday. His work with Comden would later include acting on Broadway (in On the Town, for which they wrote book and lyrics, and in A Party With Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the duo's popular revue) and penning screenplays (Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, the non-musical Auntie Mame), librettos (Applause, On the Twentieth Century) and lyrics (Bells and Ringing, The Will Rogers Follies, Wonderful Town). What was Green's contribution to the 64-year partnership of Comden and Green? "Sheer, outlandish, surreal, weird, goofy, uniquely Adolphian madness," the librettist Peter Stone said last month at a memorial for Green at the Shubert VANDAM STUDIO[Image] A Comden and Green gallery (clockwise from top left): The team in On the Town; Rosalind Russell in Wonderful Town; Keith Carradine (center) in The Will Rogers Follies; and Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing [Image]VANDAM STUDIO FRIEDMAN-ABELES[IMAGE] [IMAGE]MARTHA SWOPE 14 | WWW.PLAYBILL.COM | [IMAGE] | PURE THEATRE ONLINE MARTHA SWOPE [IMAGE][IMAGE] The late Adolph Green with the women in his life: (above) with longtime collaborator and friend Betty Comden and (right) with longtime love, wife Phyllis Newman Theatre. "This was a marriage between Dorothy Parker and all five of the Mark Brothers rolled into one." Sure, they wrote memorable ballads, but there was a "quality of sketch humor to their work that doesn't exist anymore in musical theatre," Stone has said. As the two-hour celebration of Green's life would attest, other than his love for his wife, actress Phyllis Newman, and children Amanda and Adam, Green's greatest passion was being a performer. After poignantly admitting to being lonely onstage without Green beside her, Comden convulsed the audience with this knowing description of her old friend: "When we started out and had a nightclub act, we played a lot of terrible places. One night, we were at some very awful club, and we did our act and the people didn't listen, didn't laugh - they barely sat there. We were slinking off to our dressing room, and then we heard two very light claps. And Adolph said, 'They want MORE.' Judy Holliday and I ha to hold onto his arm to keep him from going back on." A HELLUVA TOWN No survey of the work of Adolph Green is completed without mention of the character he and Comden loved to include in their shows: New York City. With their friend, composter Leonard Bernstein, they fleshed out the Jerome Robbins-Bernstein ballet scenario, Fancy Free, turning it into the 1944 musical comedy On the Town, for which they penned book and lyrics and wrote a couple of choice roles for themselves. The show - about sailors on 24-hour shore leave and the girls they pick up in Manhattan - spunkily jumped from the Museum of Natural History to Coney Island to Latin nightclubs and even into the subways and taxicabs that are so much a part of the New York landscape. The score for On the Town includes the memorable "Some Other Time," plus the brassy anthem "New York, New York,' in which the city is described as "a helluva town" where "the Bronx is up and the Battery's down." That song would be a harbinger for their other New York-set musicals: 1953's Wonderful Town (for which Green and Comden penned lyrics to Bernstein's music), 1956's Bells Are Ringing (a vehicle for Judy Holliday set to Jule Styne's music, with book and lyrics and original idea by Green and Comden) and 1961's Subways are for Sleeping (which starred Phyllis Newman, who snagged a Tony, and had book and lyrics by Comden and Green). These Comden and Green musical classics were light, breezy love letters to a city that never was, but still could be - a place of innocence, adventure, romance and hope, where a sailor could kiss a girl and sincerely hope they might "catch up some other time." ON THE TWON, WONDERFUL TOWN, AND BELLS ARE RINGING PHOTOS: BILL ROSE THEATRE COLLECTION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS | 15
