Adolph Green, 86; Lyricist and Partner Won 7 Tony Awards

Adolph Green, who with writing partner Betty Comden won seven Tony Awards in a Broadway career that stretched from “On the Town” in 1944 to their longest-running show, “The Will Rogers Follies,” in 1991, died Thursday at his home in New York City. He was 86, and the cause of death was not announced.

Setting words to the music of composers such as Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Cy Coleman, Comden and Green helped create an indelible song list that includes “Neverland” from “Peter Pan”; “Make Someone Happy,” a hit despite its beginnings in an unsuccessful 1960 show, “Do Re Mi”; and “New York, New York,” the boisterous show-opener from “On the Town.”

Comden and Green also wrote the script for “Singin’ in the Rain,” one of the most-praised of all movie musicals. They wove the story about Hollywood’s transition from silent pictures to talkies around a number of unrelated songs written years earlier by Arthur Freed and Herb Nacio Brown.

Green “was the quintessential New Yorker: buoyant, optimistic and resilient,” Broadway producer-director Hal Prince said in a statement. “And he shared all that, not only on Broadway and in film, but with his friends. To the end, he remained a generous kid.”

Though they were close friends and creative partners, Comden and Green were never romantically involved. Green had been married to actress Phyllis Newman, his third wife, for nearly 43 years.

“Adolph was a genius, brilliant in many ways,” Comden said in a telephone interview from her home in New York. “He was a funny, inventive person, and very learned.”

Green’s death caught her by surprise, she said. Just a few days ago the two had gotten together at his apartment to work on a new musical -- the last in a series of regular, often daily writing klatsches dating back to the late 1930s. Comden said she was always the scribe -- the one who held the pad and pen, then manned the typewriter and later the computer, as the technology of writing changed. But their aim -- writing lyrics and stories with snap -- stayed the same. She says she has never written with anybody else.

Green was born in the Bronx on Dec. 2, 1915, to Hungarian immigrants. After high school, he went to work as a runner on Wall Street, while trying to break into the theater as an actor. In 1938 he met the Brooklyn-born Comden, seven months his senior, who had earned a theater degree at New York University. Another of Green’s friends, Judy Tuvin -- later famous as Oscar-winning actress Judy Holliday (“Born Yesterday”) -- scrounged an invitation to perform at the Village Vanguard. She recruited Green, he brought in Comden, and with two other friends they debuted, for $5 each per night, as a satirical cabaret act called the Revuers, working up their own songs that lightheartedly spoofed Hollywood and the press. Comden and Green started writing to fuel the act.

The group prospered for a time, landing a weekly NBC radio gig and engagements at Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Trocadero in Hollywood. The Revuers’ swan song in 1944 was a fleeting appearance in the 20th Century-Fox film “Greenwich Village.”

Back in New York, Comden and Green were approached by Bernstein, a big fan of the Revuers. He and choreographer Jerome Robbins wanted to expand their ballet, “Fancy Free,” into a musical. Comden and Green supplied lyrics and the book for the story about three sailors on 24-hour shore leave in Manhattan, with a return to the war ahead of them. They also included a couple of nice parts for themselves as actors. Green played Ozzie, a sailor, and Comden was Claire de Lune, the anthropologist Ozzie meets at the Museum of Natural History.

“Because Adolph has an outgoing personality, we thought we’d make both characters kind of obsessive,” Comden told the Washington Post in 1989. “They’re both people who get carried away, although she tries to hide it. That became the basis for their big number, ‘Carried Away.’ ”

The New York Times review of “On the Town” trumpeted the musical as “a perfect example of what a well-knit fusion of the respectable arts can provide for the theater.... Everything about it is right.”

Metro Goldwyn Mayer bought the film rights before the show opened on Broadway. But adapting “On the Town” for the screen -- with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra topping the credits for the 1949 film -- was not a happy experience.

Studio bosses “thought the Bernstein music was too difficult,” Green told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “And that was very sad. But the opening’s very good, because it’s the only thing left of the score, practically, and it’s what most people remember most about the film.”

Comden and Green’s tenure in Hollywood also yielded their scripts for “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) with Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, “The Band Wagon” with Fred Astaire (1953) and “It’s Always Fair Weather,” again with Kelly (1955).

As the movie-musical era faded in the late 1950s, Comden and Green turned their energies fully to Broadway, where they had reaped their first Tony in 1953 as lyricists for “Wonderful Town” -- the winner as best musical.

In 1968, they garnered two more Tonys for “Hallelujah, Baby!,” which featured music by Styne, starred Leslie Uggams and told the story of black America’s struggle for equality.

“Applause,” a vehicle for Lauren Bacall adapted from the film “All About Eve,” was honored for best book in 1970, and “On the Twentieth Century” won Tonys for best book and score in 1978.

“The Will Rogers Follies” earned a 1991 Tony for best score, with music by Coleman and lyrics by Comden and Green. It ran for 983 performances.

Tommy Tune, who worked with Green as director-choreographer of “The Will Rogers Follies” and remained “a dear friend,” said Thursday that Green’s work had a buoyant quality that was also a hallmark of his personal style.

“He carried that childlike whimsy with him always,” Tune said. “He would walk the sartorial edge and never fall off -- just the snazziest dresser, putting green and blue and yellow and purple together without being ostentatious. He was always the guy whose feet never touched the ground -- he had this sort of lightness of being.”

The Comden-Green song list also includes “The Party’s Over” and “Just in Time.” As performers, in 1958 they mounted their own two-person Broadway show, “A Party With Betty Comden and Adolph Green.”

In an unusual detour, they wrote book and lyrics for “A Doll’s Life,” an attempt at a musical sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s drama “A Doll’s House.” It closed after just five performances in 1982.

Probably the most beloved work with which Green was associated was “Peter Pan.” He and Comden were called in, along with Styne, by Jerome Robbins to help doctor the original Mary Martin-led show with several additional songs before it opened on Broadway in 1954.

Tune fondly recalled how Green loved to regale audiences at charity benefits with a vigorous turn as Captain Hook: “He really got into it. It was just abandoned madness. He would flick his arms in these grand operatic gestures and turn and whip himself around and end up balanced on one foot” -- all the while gesticulating with a finger in lieu of a metal hook.

Quoted in a 1990 Chicago Tribune article, Green commented: “I think, at its best, our work is warm, lighthearted and throwaway, satirical without ever being brutal, and rarely slippily sentimental. Never bathetic. And always with a bubble.”

Comden and Green held the spotlight as performers as recently as 1999, when they did a cabaret stand at Joe’s Pub in New York, drawing not just from their Broadway hits but from their early Revuers material.

“He could seem elderly until he hit the stage, and then he was literally like 23,” recalled Faith Prince, who starred last year in a revival of “Bells Are Ringing,” a Comden-Green-Styne hit from 1956.

“It was amazing what performing did to him. I feel about him the way I feel about Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein,” she added. “They should live forever. I thought he would.”

Green is survived by his wife; a son, Adam Green, who is a comedian; and a daughter, Amanda Green, who is an actress and singer.

*

A Creative Partnership That Spanned Decades

Some of the collaborations between Betty Comden and Adolph Green:

Stage Musicals:

“On the Town” (1944)

“Billion Dollar Baby” (1945)

“Two on the Aisle” (1951)

“Wonderful Town” (1953)

“Peter Pan” (1954)

“Bells Are Ringing” (1956)

“Say, Darling” (1958)

“A Party With Betty Comden and Adolph Green” (1958)

“Do Re Mi” (1960)

“Subways Are for Sleeping” (1961)

“Fade Out/Fade In” (1964)

“Hallelujah, Baby!” (1968)

“Applause” (1970)

“Lorelei” (1974)

“On the Twentieth Century” (1978)

“A Doll’s Life” (1982)

“Singin’ in the Rain” (1985)

“The Will Rogers Follies” (1991)

Films:

“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1949)

“On the Town” (1949)

“The Barkleys of Broadway” (1949)

“Singin’ in the Rain” (1952)

“The Band Wagon” (1953)

“It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955)

“Bells Are Ringing” (1960)

“What a Way to Go!” (1964)

*

Associated Press