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Broadway Songwriting Legend Robert Wright Passes Away

By: Jul. 30, 2005
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Robert Wright, the composer/lyricist whose intensely melodic collaborations with George "Chet" Forrest were last heard on Broadway in 1989's Grand Hotel, passed away on Wednesday, July 27th in his Miami home. Wright, who was 90 years old, died of natural causes.

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Best known for blending classical music with musical theatre, Wright and Forrest worked together for 70 years; their first song, "Hail to Miami High" was penned in the late 1920s in high school, where the two met after Forrest auditioned for the glee club. Wright was already something of a prodigy at that time, and was conducting his own orchestra as well as playing piano in silent movie houses and working in vaudeville. Within a few years, the two landed in Hollywood to audition for MGM; they team stayed with the great movie studio for seven years, contributing songs to dozens of films in the late '30s and early '40s.

Wright and Forrest's films from the period included Madame X, Broadway Serenade, These Glamor Girls, Blondie Goes Latin and I Married An Angel (adding to what remained of the original Rodgers and Hart score). They received Academy Award nominations for a number of songs--"Always and Always" from the 1938 Joan Crawford vehicle Mannequin, "It's a Blue World" from 1940's Music in My Heart, and "Pennies for Peppino" from 1942's Flying with Music. With Herbert Stothart, Wright wrote the hit song "The Donkey Serenade" from the 1937 musical The Firefly.

From 1944, the team wrote a series of musicals in which they adapted classical music into lush Broadway scores. That year's Song of Norway was set to the music of Edvard Grieg. Operetta composer Victor Herbert received the same treatment for 1946's Gypsy Lady, while the same was true for Heitor Villa-Lobos (1948's Magdalena) and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1965's Anya, based on the life of Anastasia Romanoff). Their Tony Award-winning Kismet, from 1953, marked the apogee of this approach; its classic songs such as "Baubles, Bangles and Beads," "Stranger In Paradise" and "Not Since Nineveh" are all set to the melodies of Russian composer Alexander Borodin. Their 1978 Timbuktu! was a reworking of Kismet that starred Eartha Kitt; it was moved from an Arabian Nights-esque Baghdad to the city of its title in "the Ancient Empire of Mali, 1361."

Kean, which starred Alfred Drake as the fiery Shakespearean actor Edmond Kean, featured an original score. Unfortunately, it was not a hit. Grand Hotel was a revision of At the Grand, a 1957 musical that had closed out of town. Maury Yeston songs were added to Grand Hotel to make it a long-running hit under the stylish staging of Tommy Tune. Betting on Bertie, a 1990s musical based on the Bertie Wooster character from the P.G. Wodehouse books, was also a return to an earlier musical. However, Forrest passed away in 1999 and the project never got off the ground.

Wright and Forrest, whose musical partnership was generally a close and affectionate one, were honored with the ASCAP/Richard Rodgers Award for their contributions to American musical theater in 1995.




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