A lot of what Marvin Hamlisch composed over the course of his extraordinary 50-year career fell into a category once described by Andre Previn as "commercial cornball music" – big cheesy Hollywood numbers, including the Carly Simon James Bond theme Nobody Does It Better and the title song to the 1973 tearjerker The Way We Were. His scores were sometimes sentimental, often aspirational, always memorable (discounting the soundtrack to Three Men and a Baby) and angled to flatter the sort of female voices people listened to when drunk before Bonnie Tyler came along.
As a student at Juilliard, Hamlisch wanted to write for Broadway, and although the majority of his career was in film, his crowning achievement was the music he wrote for the 1975 Broadway show A Chorus Line. It was a feat he hoped to unseat and never did. More stage musicals followed – in 1983 a musical stage biography of Jean Seberg, directed by Peter Hall, which opened to disappointing reviews; and two stage adaptations of films – Smile, in 1993, and the Neil Simon musical The Goodbye Girl, but none matched that first success.
A Chorus Line hasn't dated much. When it was reprised a couple of years ago on Broadway, some 35 years after being written, it had a certain spangly period style to it, but the music's self-conscious strive to be modern held up. It is one of those musicals you can risk taking people who hate musicals to, all that marmoset-eyed longing and jazz hands undercut by a choppy score and fractured narrative. The songs live on.
How many people automatically sing I Hope I Get It before a job interview? Or think of the depressive swooning of At The Ballet as a perfect set-piece of frustrated expectations? And with One, Hamlisch can still lay claim to having written the most quintessential backstage number since 42nd Street. (Lingering behind all this is the memory of Michael Douglas, oddly but effectively cast in the 1985 film version, directed by Richard Attenborough. I feel like that was the last time we saw Douglas before his face froze on smirk setting.)
Because of all the movie work, Hamlisch never won the respect of Broadway purists in the way of a Jule Styne, say, or a Sondheim. And he could be guilty of over-sweetening – the Streisand / Bryan Adams duet I Finally Found Someone from The Mirror Has Two Faces brings most people with functioning ears out in hives. But his songs are the kind that stick around in people's lives. They punctuate anniversaries and turn up in tributes. If they started out as cornball, they mostly finished up as classics: not the songs we listen to so much as those we sing to each other.
