| re: Any musicals composed by a practicing dentist produced on Broadway other than one Ethel Merman vehicle? |
| Posted by: keikekaze 04:12 pm EST 03/09/23 |
| In reply to: Any musicals composed by a practicing dentist produced on Broadway other than one Ethel Merman vehicle? - dreambaby 11:57 am EST 03/09/23 |
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I never knew until now that Harold Karr was a dentist, practicing or otherwise. But just because a person is a dentist doesn't necessarily mean he's going to be incompetent as a songwriter. Merman liked to blame the score for the show's relatively modest run (though 412 performances was far from disgraceful in 1956) when she probably should have been blaming the book and/or the direction (which are in fact the usual culprits when musicals go wrong). The score for Happy Hunting was what Ethan Mordden liked to call "Fifties fun trash," by which he meant that it was no musical masterpiece but was professionally competent, like the scores of many Fifties musicals that have not endured. It was good enough to run a year in its day, and it even yielded one minor pop hit ("Mutual Admiration Society") that got quite a lot of airplay in the late Fifties.
All I know about We Take the Town is that Barbra Streisand recorded one song from it, a "wanting" song in tango misterioso tempo called "How Does the Wine Taste?" It's gorgeous. |
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re: Any musicals composed by a practicing dentist produced on Broadway other than one Ethel Merman vehicle? - Chromolume 07:46 pm EST 03/09/23 |
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re: Any musicals composed by a practicing dentist produced on Broadway other than one Ethel Merman vehicle? - Billhaven 07:39 pm EST 03/09/23 |
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