Word: finian
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...American Negro has endured Little Rock and Selma; he will survive Missitucky, the mythological country of Finian's Rainbow. There, on a beaming day, a father (Fred Astaire) and his daughter (Petula Clark) wander into a valley where white and cullud folks are jes a-sittin' and a-singin' and a-waitin' for somethin' to happen. Nothin' does. A leprechaun (Tommy Steele) wanders in, a lot of galvanic twitching goes on in the name of choreography, and eventually a white-supremacist Senator (Keenan Wynn) gets changed into a Negro. At the end, when everybody...
...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...
...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...
...lack of work. Director Mark Rydell-one of a host of refugees from television -got the chance to do The Fox when a studio executive saw a segment of / Spy that impressed him. Francis Ford Coppola, 28, is a precocious graduate of the nudie industry who is now doing Finian's Rainbow j for Warner Bros. Another untried talIent is Faye Dunaway's fianceé, Jerry | Schatzberg, 40, a still photographer of women's fashions, who is doing Puzzle of a Downfall Child...
...which take him a mere matter of weeks to rehearse. These obviously left him too much free time and energy, so last week Fred Astaire, 68, went back to work in another movie. Signed for the lead in Warner Bros. $4,000,000 version of the 1947 Broadway musical Finian's Rainbow, Astaire as usual is choreographing all his own numbers, as usual is going into training like a prizefighter to get the old bones in tip-tap shape. The master will have some new bones gliding alongside, though, in the itty-bitty form of British Popster Petula Clark...