Adler and Ross Redux
After sending a link to a friend for that Phil Silvers production of Damn Yankees I posted here the other day, it got us into a discussion of the team who wrote the score, Composer Richard Adler and lyricist Jerry Ross. They have a very interesting and unfortunate story. They wrote two shows together – both of which were massive hits. Damn Yankees was their second show, written only a year after having written The Pajama Game. Both shows ran over 1,000 performances. And then very sadly, only a few months after Damn Yankees opened, Jerry Ross died at only age 29.
Richard Adler wrote a few shows on his own. One was Kwamina, a very different show from his others. It takes place in Africa with a largely black cast about an interracial love affair. It had a respectable cast lead by Sally Ann Howes, Brock Peters and Terry Carter (who later who co-star opposite Dennis Weaver as his partner in the series McCloud.) The score is not particularly Broadway-ish, but tries to have a native sound. (I have the album. For my taste, it’s only fair.) The show flopped, just 32 performances. Adler also wrote a flop musical with Will Holt. And I have the album of a musical he wrote for TV, about Greek gods, Olympus 7-0000. Again, not a score I especially like.
He did, however, have a hit song that he wrote with another lyricist for Doris Day, “Everybody Loves a Lover”. When I was a kidling, I remember that we had a copy around the house and enjoying it, though I of course had no idea who wrote it. It’s light and frothy, and interestingly is significantly more in the style of Adler's work with Jerry Ross -- so much so, in fact, that it sounds like something that could have been in The Pajama Game. Some of you may know it. If not, here it is –
Comments