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re: Doris Day and Gene Nelson - marvelous tapping and singing - triple threats
Posted by: PlayWiz 06:19 pm EDT 07/09/17
In reply to: re: Doris Day and Gene Nelson - marvelous tapping and singing - triple threats - Alcindoro 05:05 pm EDT 07/09/17

The taps for "Singin' in the Rain" were dubbed by Gwen Verdon (Jack Cole's assistant) and Carol Haney (who was Kelly's assistant), to be completely correct. Most tap sounds were recorded later in musical films. I mean there are times in some films where folks are dancing and halfway through the number taps are heard, and the dancers haven't even had time to change their shoes to tap shoes! Anyway, I'm talking about the movement and the quality of the dancing in the clip I linked. I highly doubt that Nelson would have concocted such highly difficult number for Day -- or an even more fiendishly difficult one on the steps in the title song of the film of the same name "Lullaby of Broadway" had he not felt that she could execute them well.
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re: Doris Day and Gene Nelson - marvelous tapping and singing - triple threats
Posted by: pierce 10:45 pm EDT 07/09/17
In reply to: re: Doris Day and Gene Nelson - marvelous tapping and singing - triple threats - PlayWiz 06:19 pm EDT 07/09/17

The taps for "Singin' in the Rain" were dubbed by Gwen Verdon (Jack Cole's assistant) and Carol Haney (who was Kelly's assistant), to be completely correct...


An urban legend that's made its way onto the IMDb trivia page but has been debunked in the book "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN: The Making of an American masterpiece" by Hess and Dabholkhar; Lela Simone, Arthur Freed's invaluable assistant (who was fully involved with post-production work on the film) confirmed this. While it's very likely Verdon and Haney experimented with different shoes, trying to find the right ones that would work in the rain and make the best sound, Gene Kelly always recorded his own taps for the final cuts of his films. It was a painstaking and tedious process, but artists like Kelly, Fred Astaire and Donald O'Connor knew how unique their tap styles were and simply considered post-production tap dubbing a necessary evil.

While we're on the subject of urban legends, there's another one about milk being mixed in with the rain to make the drops more visible. That's also wrong; front and back lighting by cinematographer Hal Rosson brought out the raindrops clearly.
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re: Doris Day and Gene Nelson - marvelous tapping and singing - triple threats
Posted by: Alcindoro 10:55 pm EDT 07/09/17
In reply to: re: Doris Day and Gene Nelson - marvelous tapping and singing - triple threats - pierce 10:45 pm EDT 07/09/17

>there's another one about milk being mixed in with the rain<

That one always sounded questionable. Wouldn't milk have made a horrible stink under hot studio lights? Singin' in the yogurt.
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