Playing His Song

A few weeks ago I was walking down the street and saw a poster of Marvin Hamlisch, who'd be hosting some local festival. Hamlisch was mostly a name from the past. It was good to see him still up and about. And now he's gone.

He had quite a career.  A musical prodigy, he was a Broadway rehearsal pianist before he hit twenty.  Also, while still a teen, he wrote a hit song for Lesley Gore, "Sunshine, Lollipops, And Rainbows." She performed it in Ski Party.  The song still makes me happy.



In the late 60s he started scoring films.  My favorite stuff is the work he did for Woody Allen's earliest films:



Maybe the first I thing I ever heard him play on was the Groucho Marx album recorded at Carnegie Hall in the 70s.  He plays the overture:



In 1973 he broke like few ever have.  He adapted Scott Joplin's music for The Sting (though what ragtime was doing during the Depression no one ever explained) and composed the score for The Way We Were, including the theme song.  He ended up winning three Oscars.





At this point he could have stuck around Hollywood and made millions.  Instead he went back to his first love, Broadway, and took up Michael Bennett's offer to write a musical.  With no guarantee anything would come of it, he ending up writing the show he'll be remembered for, the biggest hit ever up to that point, 1975's A Chorus Line.  He not only won Tony and Drama Desk awards, he also shared the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (In fact, he's one of only eleven people to win the grand slam of awards--the EGOT.  Of those, only he and Richard Rodgers also got a Pulitzer.)



He followed it up with another Broadway blockbuster in 1979, They're Playing Our Song. It's a two-person musical with a script by Neil Simon.  The story is based on Hamlisch's relationship with lyricist Carol Bayer Sager.  I saw the original--though lead Robert Klein was out that day--and loved it (even if I found Sager's lyrics somewhat wanting.)



Hamlisch continued working till the end, composing many more scores for film and stage. In fact, I remember seeing Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! and laughing at the music, which was clearly a throwback, seemingly trying to copy the Woody Allen-era Marvin Hamlisch style--then I found out it was by Hamlisch himself.



However, he never really topped his success in the 70s.  Who could?