Promises Promises Review

[Steve Schenck]

Hey, All - You may have seen this, but here is the original review of PP, by the New York Times' theater critic Clive Barnes, from December of 1968. It's a glowing review. Enjoy!

Promises, Promises
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By CLIVE BARNES
Published: December 2, 1968

Yes, of course, yes! The Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach musical Promises, Promises came to the Sam S. Shubert Theater last night and fulfilled them all without a single breach. In fact it proved to be one of those shows that do not so much open as start to take root, the kind of show where you feel more in the mood to send it a congratulatory telegram than write a review.

Neil Simon has produced one of the wittiest books a musical has possessed in years, the Burt Bacharach music excitingly reflects today rather than the day before yesterday, and the performances, especially from Jerry Orbach as the put-upon and morally diffident hero, contrive, and it's no easy feat, to combine zip with charm.

Also it is a "new musical" that does, for once, seem entitled to call itself "new." To an extent the new element is to be found in the book, for although ancestors can be found for the story in How to Succeed in Business and How Now, Dow Jones, the intimacy of the piece is fresh. Even more, there is the beat of the music; this is the first musical where you go out feeling rhythms rather than humming tunes.

The story is based upon the screenplay by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond for the film The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, that has the perhaps enviable reputation of being either one of the most immoral films ever made or else a slashing satire against the American way of business life.

The hero is not a nice man. In fact he is a kind of mouse-fink, who decides to sleep his way to the top in business without really lying. The sleeping is done-in a manner of speaking-not by him but by the senior executives in the life insurance firm in which he works. He gives them the key to his apartment and they give him the key to the executive washroom. They find a haven for their girls, and he finds a haven for his aspirations.

Curiously enough, deep down where it matters he has a kind of battered integrity that suffers from nothing so much as moral color-blindness. Then he falls in love. He falls in love with a girl who is on visiting terms with his apartment but not with him. Guess what happens? You are right the first time.

Mr. Simon's play (and revealingly I find myself thinking of it as much as a play with music as a musical) crackles with wit. The jokes cling supplely to human speech so that they never seem contrived. The whole piece has a sad and wry humanity to it, to which the waspishly accurate wisecracks are only a background.

It is also interesting to see how Mr. Simon wins our sympathy, even our empathy, for his morally derelict hero. In a dramatic trick half as old as time, or at least half as old as Pirandello, he has this dubious young man address the audience direct. The same dubious young man-he must have been great at selling life insurance-takes us so far into his lack of confidence that we feel sorry for him. We even forgive his half-baked way of talking to invisible audiences. Mr. Simon, you see, is a very resourceful man, and persuasive. He wouldn't even have to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge; you would be prepared to rent it.

The music is modern pop and delightful. Mr. Bacharach-always helped by Hal David's happily colloquial lyrics-is no musical revolutionary. Yet the score does have a new beat. It is tense rather than lyrical, and it is fond of bolero rhythms and hidden celestial choirs.

It is Mr. Bacharach who gives the musical its slinky, fur-coated feel of modernity, but it is certainly a feel that has been taken up and even exploited by the staging. Robin Wagner's settings are so architecturally and decoratively perfect for time, place and period that they seem to absorb the characters like the blotting paper-style backgrounds of top class advertisements, while Donald Brooks's costumes look so apt that they will probably need to be changed every three months to keep up.

Even more considerable is the success of Robert Moore, who has directed his first musical with all the expertise of a four-armed juggler. He has dovetailed Michael Bennett's most imaginatively staged musical numbers into the whole, and given the musical notable pace and style.

The cast was virtually perfect. Mr. Orbach has the kind of wrists that look as though they are about to lose their hands, and the kind of neck that seems to be on nodding acquaintanceship with his head. He makes gangle into a verb, because that is just what he does. He gangles. He also sings most effectively, dances most occasionally, and acts with an engaging and perfectly controlled sense of desperation.

Jill O'Hara, sweet, tender and most innocently beddable, looks enchanting and sings like a slightly misty lark, and Edward Winter is handsome and satisfyingly caddish as the man who betrays her, and is finally given his deserts by our worm-turning hero.

Of the rest, I enjoyed Paul Reed, Norman Shelly, Vince O'Brien and Dick O'Neill as a quartet of tired business men hoping to get themselves tireder, and two beautifully judged character performances from A. Larry Haines as a doctor in a more than usually general practice, and Marian Mercer as a tiny-voiced hustler with a heart as big as a saloon. I liked finally the girl, Donna McKechnie, who led the dance number at the end of the first act with the power and drive of a steam hammer in heat.

[pljms]

Yes, it's been mentioned here before but it's the line, "Bacharach is no music revolutionary", that beggars belief. Clive Barnes was steeped in the theatre and opera and I don't think he had a particular interest in popular music, as that absurd statement all too clearly demonstrates.

[nymusicalsguy]

I'd cut Barnes a little slack. I hardly think Burt himself would have thought of himself as a revolutionary in 1968...a highly successful composer of "delightful" pop tunes, certainly. A few years down the road, Burt's place in the pantheon became much clearer, as a composer of the highest order, as someone who created sweeping changes in the sound of popular music (influencing a generation!) and even in the insular world of musical theatre. PROMISES' sound did revolutionize the theatrical craft of Sound Design, and its orchestrations even influenced the sound of Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY. And in 1968, Mr. Sondheim likewise was no revolutionary, either. Much like Bacharach, appreciation of Sondheim as an influential figure and innovator would come years later.

Should any of the current crop of NY critics dismiss Mr. Bacharach's work as "dated" when assessing the current revival, it will be all too clear how little they know. (Such unfortunate terms were bandied about after the drubbing of THE LOOK OF LOVE -- a musical which even Burt decried as awful. I hope PROMISES doesn't subject Messrs. Bacharach and David to the same critical dismissals.)

[BachtoBacharach]

Agreed NY; Bacharach was a pop genius in the 60s but his stature as a serious composer came much later...it took the horribly banal late 70s and 80s to put his 60s work in perspective...his 80s work, aside from a few big hits, was nowhere near as innovative. He set the curve in the 60s for unusual pop compositions and was truly unique. By 1983 or so, his work, as good as it was, was pretty much standard fare for the day and not that discernable from other composers to the average Joe in the 80s...but in the 60s, even the uninitiated knew a Bacharach tune when they heard it on the radio...there's no mistaking Do You Know the Way to San Jose or I Say A Little Prayer by Dionne Warwick or Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head by BJ Thomas; those tunes have Bacharach's stamp all over them. So intertwined with Bacharach was Warwick that many Bacharach and Warwick fans believe to this day that he composed Dionne's biggest hit from the 60s ...the #2 Theme from Valley of the Dolls...he played the piano on her single and produced it and I am sure directed the orchestra in the session...he definitely put his stamp on the tune...although the John Williams arranged vocals by Dionne in the film were great and haunting, the arrangement by Pat Williams for single was the best arrangement, IMHO and Bacharach brought out the best in the tune. Bacharach/David/Warwick are icons in the truest sense of the word. One of their tunes can take you back instantly to another place and time.

[Steve Schenck]

Agreed! Two further points: 1) No artist can reliably be judged as "great" or "revolutionary" in his or her own time. You need decades, in some cases centuries, to see whether or not the artistic output will have lasting appeal, or prove to have been just a pandering to passing trends. Burt's music, esp. his 60s output, continues to be recorded by artists of the highest order and across musical genres. 2) It was only in the mid-to-later 70s that Burt's more "symphonic" pieces began emerging with "And the People were with Her" and the "Futures" and "Woman" albums. These were albums that saw Burt's talents spreading far beyond just the "pop song" output. Of course, those albums didn't get a wide popular hearing, but professional musicians and critics were listening and approving. I recall reading a piece in Stereo Review in which no less than Lee Ritenour cited Burt as the most wonderful, professional and demanding composer/producer he had ever worked with. He was referring to one of those above-mentioned albums, I believe.

[BachtoBacharach]

It was Burt's searching for meaning, IMHO, after his split with Warwick/David that led to those virtuso-like late 70s pieces. He was no longer confined to commercial radio hits and spread his wings and soared in a way he never had. I believe his lack of commercial success in the 1970s allowed him to write what he wanted without constraint. When he was writing for Dionne, he was somewhat confined to craft those "three minute movies" as he called them...she was by 1969 running neck to neck in popularity with only Aretha and by then more often than not surpassing her in sales and airplay...wonderful for Bacharach, David and Warwick but limiting in a way to Bacharach...but I am totally sure he was not complaining and that relationship produced some of the most amazing music for such a long period. By 1981 when he hit the big-time again with Arthur's Theme it was back to crafting commercial pop tunes. Bacharach, probably feeling "relevant" again, was delighted to keep up with the new commercial demand for his work and his tunes; although that work was better than just about everything else out there, it was still shockingly unlike the unique work from the 1960s and those 1970s works. The heavy use of synthesizers in the 1980s, IMHO, sort of homogenized his sound and took some of his creativity away...and he didn't have a talented muse like Warwick to be inspired by, work with and write for and the spark, although there, was not as bright. Interesing to note that in 1979, after Warwick returned to the charts in such a big way sans Bacharach, that Bacharach said he would probably never work with Warwick again...thank goodness he didn't feel that way long. That's What Friends Are For remains his "flagship" hit from the 1980s (although not as creative as some of the other big ones he had in the 1980s) and entirely fitting that one of the biggest and most fondly remembered hits or really anthems of that decade was with Warwick.

[Rio]

I'm all for cutting people some slack. But now I think the pendulum may have swung too much in the other direction, and I would like to add my 2 cents.

I guess Clive Barnes was no Richard Rodgers, but that genius composer seems to have seen the writing on the wall. Ira Gershwin surely knew how to pick Burt out when he placed him in the company of Bach and Beethoven. Jimmy Webb also saw that there was something new and great coming to the world of music when Burt arrived. (Later, Webb simply realised that he had been right all along.)

Surely these icons were not the only ones. It may have taken a while (or forever) for people like Barnes to realize the novelties in Bacharach's writing or to appreciate the influence he had on a generation of songwriters. But it was there, and it was not going unnoticed, or it wouldn't have influenced anyone. (Even young Brazilian Marcos Valle, whose first album came out in 1964, was already under the Bacharach spell -- and knew it!)

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that no one can reliably be recognized as revolutionary in his own time, then it makes even less sense to choose to say, in 1968, that Burt, of all people, was not revolutionary.

I say Barnes should have sent the congratulatory note instead of writing that uncalled for rubbish.

[pljms]

I remember as early as 1964 that Bacharach was starting to become a household name in the UK, owing to the glut of covers by homegrown artists that were taking his songs regularly into the Top 10 and making his music such a staple of mid-60s British radio. For a non-performing composer to attain such popularity and fame was unique for that time and people started talking about the "Bacharach Sound", which actually became the title of his first TV special recorded in the UK in 1965. Apart from the fact that many of his songs used the kind of sophisticated chord sequences and unusual time signatures never before heard in the pop charts, musicians and critics alike were stating that Bacharach had revolutionized popular music by making the arrangement an integral part of his songs and that the instrumental hooks and motifs that were so crucial to songs like 'Anyone who had a Heart' and 'Walk on By' were adhered to faithfully in subsequent cover versions because they were just as much a part of the song as the lyrics and the main melodic line. That this approach to composing went on to influence the likes of Tony Hatch, Les Reed and Jimmy Webb has long been accepted, not least by the songwriters themselves. So for Clive Barnes to write what he did in 1968 just showed how far away his finger was from the pulse of popular music of that time.

[BachtoBacharach]

This is no surprise that Barnes would write such...the guy really DIDN'T have his finger on the pulse of popular music at the time so I can overlook what he wrote. No big deal for a Broadway critic to be so uninformed about the music world outside Broadway and opera. In the US, Bacharach was less a cult figure in the early 60s than in the UK...US audiences were introduced to the uniqueness of his music through primarily Warwick unlike the UK where a plethora of different artists covered his tunes. Bacharach became much more famous in the US about 1967...Burt Bacharach told John Houston, Cissy's husband, that there were two tunes that Dionne hit with in the US that started him on the path to his own superstardom in the US and around the world...Alfie and I Say A Little Prayer. Ironically, those are the same two tunes that also kicked Dionne's career to an even higher level. It is not hard to understand why in the US and other places in the world that Bacahrach and Warwick are so often mentioned in the same breath. Bacharach's uniqueness was always recognized in the 1960s and he did revolutionize popular music but his genius was not universally acknowledged by most everyone until much later. His peers like Webb, etc certainly saw that genius early on and emulated it but the public didn't catch up until much later...they just loved his music without sitting around thinking what a complex piece of work it was...and same for Dionne...no one sat around and marveled at what a virtuoso vocalist she was...they just liked the way she sounded singing Bacharach and just about anything else. That doesn't change the fact that they both were so unusually great...folks just loved their music. By 1969, a lot of "serious" music critics sniffed that Bacharach was too MOR. My take on that is that they were MORons!

[Sara D]

Good to see I wasn't the only one to baulk at that statement by Clive Barnes! Like pljms, I can remember how in the UK in the mid-60s Bacharach was being revered almost like a classical composer because of the complexity of his songs and arrangements. A quote from that time by Anthony Newley that Bacharach had revolutionized the popular song by replacing noise with creative music is a perfect summation.