Last night's concert was delightful. There were four singers - two men and two women (including Judy Kaye, who played Emma Goldman in Ragtime). Steven Blier (one of the co-founders of the New York Festival of Song, the organization that put on the event) played the piano and spoke about Waller, Fields, and their songs between numbers. He's an absolute treasure: a superb musician who is both erudite and witty, and his comments are usually almost as much fun as the songs themselves.
The program was about evenly divided between Waller songs and Fields songs, and between well-known and lesser-known songs. As I hoped, there was one song from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ("He Had Refinement", sung by Judy Kaye). "April Snow" (a beautiful Fields song from Up in Central Park, which I'm familiar with from Barbara Cook's CD of Fields songs) was also on the program. It was interesting to hear it as a duet (as it was originally written) instead of a solo, as Barbara Cook does it.
One of the lesser-known Waller songs on the program was a gorgeous song (possibly the last one he ever wrote) called "There's a Man in My Life", which was written for a 1943 Broadway musical called Early to Bed (about which ibdb has frustratingly little information). And the tune that kept going through my head for the rest of the night, after the concert was over, was Waller's "All That Meat and No Potatoes"!
Just saw your post, wandeljw. Nope, I didn't see anyone who looked like gus at the concert. However, the young men who were on my subway train on the way home -- who had been to the Knicks game and had apparently consumed several beers while there -- did bear a slight resemblance to him.
Unfortunately (as the last verse tells us):
He had such respect and feeling
All our married life,
Just the thought that maybe he'd hurt me
Cut him like a knife,
So he never mentioned that
He had another wife.
He had refinement.
Oh I forgot to mention:
He had respect and feeling all our married life
Just the thought that maybe he'd hurt me
Cut him like a knife
So he never mentioned that
He had another wife
He had refinement, refinement
A gentleman to his fingernails was he. :wink:
Do you know the Dorothy Fields song "Remind Me", from One Night in the Tropics? Steven Blier said that, when he was putting the show together, several songwriters told him he had to include "Remind Me" because the lyrics are the best she ever wrote. He also said the lyrics are typical Dorothy Fields: "She's always hot to trot, but always blames the other person." You can see what he meant from this excerpt:
Turn off that charm,
I'm through with love for a while.
I'm through, and yet
You have a fabulous smile,
So if I forget...
Remind me
Not to find you so attractive,
Remind me
That the world is full of men.
When I start to miss you,
To touch your hand,
To kiss you,
Remind me
To count to ten.
I had a feeling when I met you
You'd drive me crazy if I'd let you,
But all my efforts to forget you
Remind me I'm in love again.
No. I never heard that song. And now I'm trying to place "One Night in the Tropics".
Good lyrics.
Oh my gosh. It's an Abbott and Costello movie. Says "Remind Me" was played in the background and dubbed for Peggy Moran. Her name is so familiar. I know I didn't see that movie because I don't recognize any of the Jerome Kern songs.
It is bizarre, isn't it? Fields and her brother, Herb Fields (they were the children of the vaudevillian Lew Fields) also wrote the play on which another Abbott and Costello movie, Mexican Hayride, was based.
Oh that is funny. There were only two musical numbers in Mexican Hayride that I can see. I notice toward the end of the cast "Sid (Sidney) Fields is listed as an "AP reporter.
Probably another sibling.
Bree: Have you found an actor with three common title words? So far, I haven't found any with more than two.
Let me take a look now and see what I can find. I was thinking, we don't necessarily have to say the exact same word appears in all the titles, we could use "themes", like names of cities (or American cities) in the title.
OK, here's a "theme" question:
Devil or angel? This actor appeared in two movies with "Devil" in the title, and two movies with "Angels" in the title.
Humphrey Bogart
A Devil with Women
Beat the Devil
We're No Angels
Angels With Dirty Faces
Yes to Bogart and the movies. Your turn.
This actress was in three movies that mention "a season of the year".
I should clarify. Two of the seasons are the same.
