Jewish Stereo Types

Guilt doesn't seem like a promising direction. Let's try something else entirely: Video posted by omarov No, no, NO, they can't stop there! You can't have Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers not dance! (Go ahead, go full screen for it, you know you want to.) Video posted by UberDurable That was "Pick Yourself Up," music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and it was written for the 1936 movie these clips came from, Swing Time . It's been covered and recovered , and was (almost) quoted by Barack Obama in his first Inaugural Address . *** We've run across Dorothy Fields before , but I hadn't mentioned that her father, Lew Fields (born Moses Schoenfeld), started out in theater as half of Weber and Fields --one of the most popular comedy teams in vaudeville--and then became a successful theater producer . Despite this show business background, Dorothy did anything but coast--even though a female lyricist and librettist was a rarity in her...

Here's Esperanza Spalding showing us what a jazz musician does with a standard such as "On the Sunny Side of the Street" by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields: Video posted by muslin I don't have a separate "making me happy" thing tonight, but that is a joyful performance if there ever was one! *** Jimmy McHugh wasn't Jewish, but the lyricist Dorothy Fields was , and if the name isn't familiar to you, I bet her songs are : "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby," "I'm in the Mood for Love," "I Won't Dance," "A Fine Romance," "The Way You Look Tonight," "Big Spender," and many others.

Neil Simon died this past Sunday (Aug. 26, 2018) , and his humor ran through the lives of so many of us. I'm too young to have seen Your Show of Shows , but I saw a few of his many successful plays and several of the over twenty movies for which he wrote screenplays (for some reason I particularly recall Murder by Death ). Although he never wrote any song lyrics that I know of, he did write the books for a number of musicals (and was script doctor to quite a few more), so here are some songs from some of those. RIP, Mr. Simon, you are missed.   From Sweet Charity (book by Neil Simon, music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields), "There's Gotta Be Something Better than This," sung by Chita Rivera, Donna McKechnie, and Bebe Neuwirth at a one-night only concert in 1997: Video posted by primativo7   From Promises, Promises (book by Neil Simon, music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David), "I'll Never Fall In Love Again," sung by Kristin Chenowe...