Adelaide's Lament

"Adelaide's Lament" is a show tune from the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, written by Frank Loesser, which opened at the 46th Street Theatre on November 24, 1950. It was performed on stage by Vivian Blaine who later reprised her role as Miss Adelaide in the 1955 film version of the play; in its biography of Blaine, the Encyclopædia Britannica describes her as "best remembered for her showstopping rendition of 'Adelaide's Lament' in both the Broadway and film productions of Guys and Dolls.

In the song, Adelaide alternates between reading sentences aloud from a pop psychology book and commenting on what she is reading. The textbook discusses psychosomatic illness, and the singer posits that her constant common cold may actually be a manifestation of her resentment over her fiancé's constant assurances of imminent marriage, which he never fulfills. A reviewer in London's Daily Mail called it "one of the great songs of American musical theatre."

In a 50th-anniversary NPR retrospective on the making of the original Broadway production, Blaine recalled the creation of Miss Adelaide specifically to fit Blaine into the musical after the creators decided she was ill-suited to play the buttoned-up Sarah. In the same retrospective, host Scott Simon observed that "Adelaide's Lament" is "often considered a perfect comic song" and offered a clip of lyricist Fred Ebb's analysis of its appeal:

Adelaide

Adelaide (ⁱ/ˈædəleɪd/ AD-ə-layd) is the capital city of the state of South Australia, and the fifth-most populous city of Australia. In June 2014, Adelaide had an estimated resident population of 1.30 million. The demonym "Adelaidean" is used in reference to the city and its residents. Adelaide is north of the Fleurieu Peninsula, on the Adelaide Plains between the Gulf St Vincent and the low-lying Mount Lofty Ranges which surround the city. Adelaide stretches 20 km (12 mi) from the coast to the foothills, and 90 km (56 mi) from Gawler at its northern extent to Sellicks Beach in the south.

Named in honour of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort to King William IV, the city was founded in 1836 as the planned capital for a freely-settled British province in Australia. Colonel William Light, one of Adelaide's founding fathers, designed the city and chose its location close to the River Torrens, in the area originally inhabited by the Kaurna people. Light's design set out Adelaide in a grid layout, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and entirely surrounded by parklands. Early Adelaide was shaped by prosperity and wealth — up until the Second World War, it was Australia's third largest city. It has been noted for early examples of religious freedom, a commitment to political progressivism and civil liberties. It has been known as the "City of Churches" since the mid-19th century.

Guys and Dolls

Guys and Dolls is a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure" – two short stories by Damon Runyon, – and also borrows characters and plot elements from other Runyon stories – most notably "Pick the Winner".

The premiere on Broadway was in 1950. It ran for 1200 performances and won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The musical has had several Broadway and London revivals, as well as a 1955 film adaptation starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine.

Guys and Dolls was selected as the winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. However, because of writer Abe Burrows' troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Trustees of Columbia University vetoed the selection, and no Pulitzer for Drama was awarded that year.

Background

Guys and Dolls was conceived by producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin as an adaptation of Damon Runyon's short stories. These stories, written in the 1920s and 1930s, concerned gangsters, gamblers, and other characters of the New York underworld. Runyon was known for the unique dialect he employed in his stories, mixing highly formal language and slang. Frank Loesser, who had spent most of his career as a lyricist for movie musicals, was hired as composer and lyricist. George S. Kaufman was hired as director. When the first version of the show's book, or dialogue, written by Jo Swerling was deemed unusable, Feuer and Martin asked radio comedy writer Abe Burrows to write a new version of the book.

Faith Prince

Faith Prince (born August 6, 1957) is an American actress and singer, best known for her work on Broadway in musical theatre. She won the Tony Award as Best Actress in a Musical (in 1992), and received three other Tony nominations.

Life and career

Prince was born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she attended E.C. Glass High School, and later studied theater at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She made her Broadway debut as the Gypsy character Tessie Tura in Jerome Robbins' Broadway (1989) and followed this with a role in the ill-fated Nick & Nora.

She established herself as a Broadway star with her portrayal of Miss Adelaide in the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls, for which she won both the Tony and Drama Desk Award as Best Actress in a Musical. In 2001, Prince was once again nominated for Tony and Drama Desk Awards for her portrayal of Ella Peterson in the revival of Bells Are Ringing. She was featured in the 2008 Broadway musical A Catered Affair, for which she received Tony and Drama Desk nominations.

Lament

A lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner, where the participant would lament about something they regret or someone they've lost, usually accompanied by wailing, moaning and/or crying.

History

Many of the oldest and most lasting poems in human history have been laments. Laments are present in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and laments continued to be sung in elegiacs accompanied by the aulos in classical and Hellenistic Greece. Lament elements figure in Beowulf, in the Hindu Vedas, and in ancient Near Eastern religious texts, including the Mesopotamian city laments such as the Lament for Ur and the Jewish Tanakh, (which would later become the Christian Old Testament).

In many oral traditions, both early and modern, the lament has been a genre usually performed by women: Batya Weinbaum made a case for the spontaneous lament of women chanters in the creation of the oral tradition that resulted in the Iliad The material of lament, the "sound of trauma" is as much an element in the Book of Job as in the genre of pastoral elegy, such as Shelley's "Adonais" or Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis".