All tagged Lerner & Loewe

Remembering Paint Your Wagon

Lerner and Loewe certainly wrote some gorgeous music together for Broadway and Hollywood musicals. From Brigadoon to My Fair Lady, from Gigi to Camelot, the duo crafted lush, elegant music with sweeping melodies and intelligent, character developing lyrics. The duo also wrote the score for another musical that is seldom revived today, on Broadway or otherwise, but that deserves to be remembered for its potent, often haunting score. That musical is Paint Your Wagon

Broadway Blip: Brigadoon

One of the most popular musicals of the twentieth century (it was certainly produced by every high school and community theatre) was the 1947 Lerner & Loewe classic Brigadoon. It established the composing team as second only to Rodgers and Hammerstein in prowess, setting the duo up to evolve toward their most celebrated project, My Fair LadyBrigadoon tells the story of two Americans on a hunting trip in the Scottish Highlands.

Broadway Musical Time Machine: Looking Back at Camelot

Lerner and Loewe are considered by many, after Rodgers and Hammerstein, to be the “duo supreme” of musical theatre composing teams. They certainly got onboard for the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula, and many of their musicals owe their success to that template. From their early scores for Brigadoon and Paint Your Wagon, to film with Gigi and The Little Prince, to their masterpiece My Fair Lady, the partnership yielded some of the most elegant, sophisticated, and memorable music in the history of musicals.

Top-Ten Lyrics that Perfectly Capture the Moment and Character

As I was writing my piece on Falsettos earlier this week, I was thinking about how William Finn captured so much in the lyric "Keeping up my head as my heart falls out of sight" in the terrific "Holding to the Ground." It got me thinking about what lyrics stopped me in my tracks with their efficiency and complexity in summing up a character in just a few short words. This week, for my "Top-Ten List," I have decided to explore that theme a little further: The Top-Ten Lyrics that Perfectly Capture the Moment and Character. Since I have already delved more deeply into "Holding to the Ground" in a former article, I will leave that one off of this list (for the opportunity to explore an additional song).