Word: finian
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DIED. BURTON LANE, 84, high school dropout turned celebrated stage and film composer who wrote the music for the Broadway shows Finian's Rainbow and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; in New York City. Lane won a Grammy and was nominated for a Tony for On a Clear...
...right, but in retrospect the most startling thing about the team's success is that their creativity was far from unique. In the heyday of Broadway musicals, nearly every season brought a landmark production, often two or three. The 1946-47 season that introduced Brigadoon, for example, also provided Finian's Rainbow. The 1956-57 season of My Fair Lady was, in addition, the season of Bells Are Ringing, Candide, The Most Happy Fella and Li'l Abner. The 1960-61 debut season of Camelot saw as well the arrival of Irma la Douce, The Unsinkable Molly Brown...
...members of the Kamehameha School glee club. Singer Kate MacKenzie, a.k.a. Sheila, the Christian Jungle Girl, rushes up to check a cue. Sound men and stagehands circulate. Buster the Show Dog signs autographs, in the person of Actor Tom Keith, who also does the voices of Father Finian and Timmy, the Sad Rich Boy, motor and siren noises and dandy skyrocket effects...
After graduation in 1966, Lucas worked as an assistant to Francis Coppola, who was directing Finian's Rainbow. Coppola, who remains a friend, later helped him find backing for his feature, THX 1138 (1971), a chilling look at a futuristic world in which people live underground and numbers have replaced names. American Graffiti came next. Its success persuaded 20th Century-Fox to invest money in Lucas' strange script about chirping robots, Jedi knights and a form of hocus-pocus called the Force...
DIED. E.Y. ("Yip") Harburg, 82, song lyricist who wrote the witty, often wistful words to the movie musical The Wizard of Oz and to Broadway's Finian's Rainbow, as well as to such tunes as It's Only a Paper Moon and April in Paris; in an automobile accident; in Los Angeles. The New York City-born Harburg, who won an Academy Award in 1939 for Oz's Over the Rainbow, remained productive and outspoken through the '60s and '70s, deploring the newer generations of songsmiths for their "lack of craftsmanship, their imitative...