Volume 48, Number 9 · May 31, 2001
A Betting Man
By Brad Leithauser
Bells Are Ringing
music by Jule Styne, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, directed by Tina Landau, and starring Faith Prince
at the Plymouth Theatre, New York City
Jule Styne, the Broadway and Tin Pan Alley composer, had a bustling career that ran for more than half a century, before he died, at the age of eighty-eight, in 1994. If he's known at all among the young today, it's probably for scattered melodies from his mid-to-late work—like 'People,' from Funny Girl (1964), which gets occasional play on oldies stations, or 'Small World,' from Gypsy (1959), as sung by Johnny Mathis, whose numerous hits seem to keep getting reshuffled as late-night-television 'special offers.' But to those of an older generation who recall his earlier triumphs, Styne inspires a solid, rooted loyalty. He was one of the composers who devised the background music for the strangest, most far-flung homecoming in our nation's history, the one in which America's boys in uniform—the sons of coal-miners, factory hands, tobacco farmers, cattle ranchers—returned from bloody sites as remote as they were unpronounceable: Corregidor, Tulagi, Bizerte, Avranches.
Review, 2795 words
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