Married Alive

Cleverly camouflaged by Vincent Price's remarkable singing voice (which Who's Who sees fit to label "baritone"), the score to Married Alive is a tolerable item. But Jule Styne and E. Y. Harburg, who wrote it, should be capable of better. Harburg's lyrics pale beside Jamaica; for the creator of Finian's Rainbow, they are pure embarrassment. Styne's music is enough to make one suspicious of the authorship of Gypsy and Funny Girl.

As an entity, the score to Married Alive recalls Noel Coward's Girl Who Came to Supper, which in turn derived much from Lerner and Lowe's My Fair Lady. All three shows were set in London and told similar stories of upper-crust-lower-crust romances. Their broader similarities suggest the growing importance of settings in the writing of musical comedy. The outstanding musicals since Oklahoma have, almost to a one, been distinguished by unusual or untried locales: Finian's Rainbow in a mythical Southland; Guys and Dolls in and around the classier sewers of New York city; Pajama Game in a factory; West Side Story as close to the ghetto as Leonard Bernstein could manage without being overcome by the stench; and How to Succeed several hundred feet above lower Manhattan.

The exceptions have mainly been the work of veteran songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Lowe. They found it possible in the '50's to treat familiar tales of high society or backstage life which might have spelled doom in the hands of their juniors. Call Me Madam ,Can Can, The Sound of Music and Camelot were triumphs of technical genius, the net products of their creators rather than of their subject material.

The CRIMSON is pleased to announce the election of Robin Barnes '69 of 24 Garden St. and Belmont; Michael J. Barrett '70 of Eliot House and Reading; Laura R. Benjamin '70 of Cabot Hall and Great Neck, N.Y.; Jeffrey D. Blum '70 of Dunster House and N. Bergen, N.J.; Esther Dyson '71 of Eliot Hall and Princeton, N.J.; Nicholas Gagarin '70 of Quincy House and Litchfield, Conn.; Sophie A. Krasik '70 of Comstock Hall and Pittsburgh, Pa.; Elizabeth P. Nadas '69 of Eliot Hall and Wellesley; Mark R. Rasmuson '70 of Winthrop House and Salt Lake City, Utah; Sandra E. Ravich '70 of Barnard Hall and Winthrop; Adele M. Rosen '70 of 58 Linnaean St. and Great Neck, N.Y.; and Thomas P. Southwick '71 of Weld Hall and Chevy Chase, Md., to the News Board; of Jack D. Burke Jr. '70 of Leverett House and Richmond, Va.; Salahuddin I. Imam '70 of Dunster House and Daica, Pakistan; and Peter A. Jaszi '68 of Dudley House and Chevy Chase, Md., to the Editorial Board; of Ronald H. Janis '70 of Kirkland House and Buffalo, N.Y., to the Photo Board; and of Kelly S. Barge '70 of Eliot House and Atlanta, Ga.; Thomas A. Bell '69 of Quincy House and Broomall, Pa.; and David J. Decker '70 of Winthrop House and Rochester, Minn., to the Business Board.

This, on a somewhat less spectacular level, is what one had every right to expect from a Styne-Harburg collaboration. The property--Arnold Bennett's novel Buried Alive--made two successful movies, and there seemed no reason why it couldn't sustain a successful musical too. But Nunnally Johnson, who did the screenplay to the 1943 movie Holy Matrimony, has merely tightened his script a little and introduced a few new scenes in converting it to musical comedy. It isn't enough. Though Holy Matrimony was a charming comedy, its success is in retrospect attributable to the genius of its star, Monty Woolley. In the same role--that of England's foremost turn-of-the-century painter, Priam Farll--Vincent Price falls completely flat and pulls the show down with him.

Just as Johnson's libretto ignores the differences between '40's movies and '60's musicals, Styne and Harburg's songs are ancient in their inspirations. Harburg seems to have completely missed the lyrical revolution epitomized by Frank Loesser's How to Succeed, in which words like "Some irresponsible dress manufacturer" were set to music. The lyrics to Married Alive are still drawn from the same preposterous vocabulary (love, tree, rainbow, etc.) that dominated the worst of Hart and Hammerstein.

Married Alive is a depressing counter to the prevailing theory that great musicals are made from stable properties, workmanlike librettists, and aging song-writers.