Editorial Reviews

The 1978 Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century is an adaptation of Twentieth Century, the 1932 straight play and comic farce by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (in turn based on the unproduced play The Napoleon of Broadway by Charles Bruce Millholland) about Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant theatrical producer on his uppers, who boards the 20th Century Limited train for a cross-country trip during which he hopes to lure his former protégé, the film star Lily Garland, also on board, back to the stage, and thereby return to solvency. The 1934 film version directed by Howard Hawks, and starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, was a classic, and lyricist/librettists Betty Comden and Adolph Green transfer much of its tone to the musical. They are well suited to do so, as veterans of sketch comedy and also the screenwriters of the similarly toned movie musical Singin' in the Rain, another send-up of Hollywood. This is broad comedy requiring larger than life, over the top performances, and it gets them from John Cullum, channeling Barrymore, and Madeline Kahn, who is both a remarkable soprano and a remarkable comedienne. Another veteran is composer Cy Coleman, although he has not worked with Comden and Green previously. Coleman is a highly adaptable writer, and he mixes operetta with some '30s jazz styles effectively in his music. This is not the sort of show that an audience is going to think much about after leaving the theater, and this is not a cast album of songs that will be memorable outside the context of the show. But when it's going on, the show works like gangbusters, and the album serves as a good souvenir. William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

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