Adolph Green

Playwright and actor

• Born: December 2, 1914
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: October 23, 2002
• Place of death: New York, New York

Green’s collaboration with Betty Comden, which began in 1938 and continued until his death in 2002, was among the most productive and successful in the history of American musical theater.

Early Life

Adolph Green was the son of two Eastern European Jews, Daniel Green and Helen Weiss, who left their native Hungary in the early twentieth century with the expectation of building better lives in New York. The city was a magnet for European Jews, who were eager for their children to enjoy the inexpensive educational opportunities, from elementary school through colleges and universities that offered solid undergraduate education and graduate programs leading to master’s and doctoral degrees, that New York offered.

Adolph Green spoke Hungarian before he spoke English. Following his graduation from New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School in 1934, he enrolled in college courses but quickly lost interest. He dropped out almost immediately. His chief interest was theater. He supported himself with menial jobs that enabled him to participate in small theater groups in the evenings.

During the summer of 1937, Green played the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance (1879), a W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan operetta being performed at Onata, a summer camp in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Here Green met Leonard Bernstein, who also worked at the camp. The two built a friendship that lasted through their lives and quickly blossomed into a productive professional relationship.

When Green was passed over for other roles at Camp Onata, he returned to New York and joined a theater group, The Six Company. Shortly afterward, Betty Comden joined this group, which created short plays and songs in a downtown loft. The group spent much of the summer of 1938 performing at summer camps.

Life’s Work

In 1938, Green joined Comden, Judy Tuvim, Alvin Hammer, and John Frank in establishing the Revuers, a group that presented short dramatic pieces along with songs and lyrics contributed mostly by Comden and Green. This company performed so successfully at the Village Vanguard that, in 1939, it was brought to New York City’s Rainbow Room for an extended run. The following year, the Revuers performed in Radio City Music Hall.

In 1940, Adolph married Elizabeth Reitel, a marriage that ended in divorce. In 1947, he married Allyn McLerie, from whom he was divorced in 1951. The last of his three marriages was to actor Phyllis Newman, who bore him two children, Adam in 1961 and Amanda in 1964.

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Comden and Green divided their time between New York and Hollywood, where they continued to produce phenomenal quantities of work. Through all of the years of their professional relationship, they worked together almost daily, usually for five or six hours a day, in Comden’s apartment if they were in New York and in whatever temporary quarters they occupied during their sojourns in California.

In 1944, Bernstein asked the pair to write the lyrics and music for a musical based on an idea by Jerome Robbins that Bernstein wished to produce. The result was On the Town, Comden and Green’s most successful early musical, which also was a notable success as a film released in 1949. Before their first film, Good News, was released in 1947, they were enjoying considerable success with performances of the Revuers and with such musicals as Billion Dollar Baby (1945).

The pair produced musicals for some six decades, attracting enthusiastic audiences with such plays as Singin’ in the Rain (1985), Wonderful Town (1953), Bells Are Ringing (1956), Do Re Mi (1960), Applause (1970), On the Twentieth Century (1978), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), and many others.

In 1990, Green and Comden received the William Inge Theatre Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Theatre. The following year they received the Johnny Mercer Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. On December 8, 1991, they received the highest honor the United States can bestow on performers: the Kennedy Center Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Performing Arts. Comden and Green had active lives as actors both on the stage and in films. They were unfailingly charitable, contributing regularly to the Federation for Jewish Charities and the National Conference for Christians and Jews. Green died at his home in Manhattan on October 23, 2002, at the age of eighty-seven.

Significance

Green and his collaborator, with their incredible versatility and admirable energy and imagination, created a new era in the American musical. They won seven Tony Awards and were nominated for five more. Active in writing for both Broadway and Hollywood, they also were splendid actors in both venues. The pair, spending more time together than most married couples do, succeeded in maintaining their close working relationship from 1938 until Green’s death in 2002.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Leonard. The Joy of Music. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. The chapter “American Musical Comedy” presents interesting insights into Bernstein’s association with Green and Comden.

Comden, Betty. Off Stage. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. An informative assessment of Comden’s collaborations and relationship with Green.

Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Concise coverage of Comden and Green’s producing the lyrics and music for Bernstein’s On the Town (1944) that was a success on Broadway and later as a film (1949).

Lamb, Andrew. One Hundred Fifty Years of Popular Musical Theatre. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Mentions Comden and Green in the context of popular music in United States theater.

Robinson, Alice M. Betty Comden and Adolph Green: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A comprehensive bibliography of the works that grew out of Green’s long collaboration with Comden. Excellent biographical essay, although it covers its subjects only to 1992.