Music: The Show’s the Thing

The ingredients of good show tunes come from requirements of staging, action and pace, and as a result relatively few show tunes become pop hits. But last week, no fewer than three tunes from The Pajama Game, Broadway’s brightest musical of the season, were tweaking jukebox and disk-jockey fancies: a slinky, satirical tango called Hernando’s Hideaway was high on the bestseller record lists, a rowdy novelty called Steam Heat was also on the lists, and the show’s big ballad, Hey There, suddenly showed signs of becoming a big hit.

Nobody was more surprised, or pleased, by this than Manhattan’s Richard Adler, 30, and Jerry Ross, 28, creators of Pajama Game’s musical score and the U.S.’s hottest songwriting team. “This,” they say with a verve that is not yet curdled by success, “is the pot o’ gold.” For Adler and Ross, the magical rainbow began to form about four years ago, when they met in a music publisher’s office and decided to pool their talents. Adler’s contributions: a childhood rebellion against formal music studies (his father is Pianist Clarence Adler), a perennial playgoer’s love for the stage, and the experience in idea-juggling that came from an advertising job with a textile manufacturer. Ross’s contributions: youthful stage experience in the Jewish theater and music studies at N.Y.U.

Big Guns. Both had been moderately successful songwriters individually and admirers of each other’s work. Both could write both words and music. A large part of their collaboration, they discovered after getting together, turned on a spontaneous veto-rule: one of them would suggest an idea for a lyric or hum a snatch of melody; if the other actively opposed it, out it went without argument. Some days, when working to a deadline, they might draft all but the last eight bars of a song, and each go home to dream up his own solution. After that, a song usually got about a week’s polishing before both were satisfied.

Most of their first years together were spent writing special material for nightclub acts and TV shows (e.g., Stop the Music}. The first glimmer of bigger success came when Songwriter Frank (Guys and Dolls}) Loesser decided they were a promising team, and signed them up for his new publishing house. Among their 150-odd songs: last winter’s hit, Rags to Riches, seven numbers for John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.

Periodically, Ross and Adler sang and played their songs for Veteran Producer George Abbott (“one of the most frightening experiences we ever had”), and last fall, after three years of hearing their offerings, Abbott gave them the script for Pajama Game (from Richard Bissell’s novel 7½ Cents})—and a month in which to write the first four songs. The big audition came on Christmas Eve, when they performed the songs for a battery of theatrical big guns. “We were scared to death,” says Adler. “It was a lousy Christmas Eve.” But next day they were told to go ahead with the rest of the score.

By the Bale. The project appealed to them from the start. Both songwriters shy from commonplace situations, and Pajama Game’s unconventional pajama-factory setting and management-labor struggle bristled with off-beat possibilities. They liked the idea of a rough, tough chorus, and wrote “fish or cut bait” parts for it.

For their ballad they invented a switch on old operatic letter scenes, had Baritone John Raitt sing into an office dictating machine and then do a duet with his own recorded voice.

Pajama Game’s songs sometimes seem to echo other recent show tunes, sometimes are “different” in a self-conscious way. But the song-buying public likes the style, is buying Rosemary Clooney’s version of Hey There by the bale (Columbia Records factory orders last week: 40,000 copies). As for Adler and Ross, they are now vacationing 100 miles apart, looking around for another script that is sufficiently out of the ordinary to start work on another show. “If we find one that ten people say is ridiculous,” they say, “we’ll probably do it.”