Cy Coleman (1929 - 2004) was one of the twentieth century's most versatile composers of popular music. A jazz pianist, Cy Coleman also wrote enduring popular songs, as well as the scores for over a dozen musicals and several films.

Born Seymour Kaufman, from a family of Russian immigrants, Coleman grew up in New York and was very clearly a child prodigy, playing recitals at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall before his age reached double figures. He studied at the New York College of Music, where he became fascinated by jazz - soon forming the Cy Coleman Trio, and becoming a regular feature on the New York nightclub scene. In addition to performing and recording with this trio (Coleman was the piano player), he began composing songs with lyricist Joseph Allen McCarthy and later with Carolyn Leigh throughout the 1950s.

Popular Songs

During this period, Coleman composed a number of songs which have since become standards, recorded by artists such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Most of these standards were written with lyricist Carolyn Leigh - their collaborations include 'Witchcraft' (1957), 'It Amazes Me' (1958) and 'You Fascinate Me So' (1958). Other hit songs happened quite by accident. 'Firefly' (1958), recorded by Tony Bennett, was written as an audition song for the Broadway musical Gypsy¹. And the tune for 'The Best Is Yet To Come' was never intended as a vocal piece, but rather as a tune performed by the Cy Coleman Trio. When Coleman was on the road with the trio in 1959 and unavailable to work with Leigh, she set words to the tune, which is now probably his second most recorded song (after a certain tune from Sweet Charity, mentioned below). The tune for this number contains a number of tricky intervals, making it quite a technical feat for a singer to perform it correctly. This is unsurprising, as the song was not originally meant to be sung.

During the 1960s, once Coleman's Broadway career had begun in earnest, he gradually stopped writing for the popular music market, concentrating his efforts on compositions for his shows and his Trio. His last few hit songs of the popular kind included 'When in Roma' (1964, lyrics by Leigh) and 'Then Was Then and Now Is Now' (1965, lyrics by Peggy Lee). However, his compositions for film and theatre would continue to be recorded by popular artists for some time after this.

Films

Between 1964 and 1989, Cy Coleman wrote the scores for eight movies, though none of them were outstanding successes. A couple of them included original songs with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh and Sheldon Harnick², but the rest were 'straight' musical compositions. Most of the scores were written at times when his Broadway output was low, including three scores for films directed by Sydney Lumet in the 1980s.

Broadway

Cy Coleman's Broadway career began at the age of 24 when his song 'Tin Pan Alley'³ was used in John Murray Anderson's Almanac, a revue which ran from 1953 - 1954. A few years later, he composed the incidental music for Meyer Levin's play Compulsion, which ran on Broadway for four months from October 1957. Once paired up with lyricist Carolyn Leigh, he auditioned unsuccessfully for composing jobs on several musicals, before the pair was finally given the assignment to write the score for Wildcat, a 1960 vehicle for comedienne Lucille Ball, star of I Love Lucy. He would occasionally contribute incidental music or single songs to plays and revues after this, but writing full scores soon became Coleman's principal musical activity.

Wildcat was not a success. Lucille Ball's name attracted high ticket sales in advance, but these did not translate into a hit show, and the star comedienne soon fell ill and left⁴, causing the show to close. Coleman and Leigh's score was professional, but not very exciting. However, the opening march, 'Hey Look Me Over', one of the jauntiest of all show tunes, achieved a measure of popularity outside the show, being covered by stars such as Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby.

Coleman and Leigh's next show, Little Me (1962), had a book⁵ by Neil Simon, in turn based on the novel of the same name by Patrick Dennis. The show was very funny, and starred Sid Caesar as all of the seven men in the life of the heroine Belle Poitrine. Coleman's score was jazzy and Leigh's lyrics were witty, including some good comedy songs such as 'I've Got Your Number' and 'Deep Down Inside'. The score also included a sweet waltz called 'Real Live Girl' and a song that would be played at Judy Garland's funeral - 'Here's To Us'. This show was more successful than Wildcat, but still not a great hit on Broadway. In London, however, it was a great success, starring Bruce Forsyth in the Sid Caesar roles. This situation was repeated in revivals, where productions starring James Coco, Victor Garber and Martin Short failed to set the box office alight in New York, though a London revival starring Russ Abbott achieved a lengthy run.

Cy Coleman's third Broadway show assured his place in the history of musicals. With a book by Neil Simon, this time adapted from Federico Fellini's film Nights of Cabiria, and lyrics by Dorothy Fields⁶, Sweet Charity (1966) was Cy Coleman's first hit show, and thus far the only one of his stage shows to be filmed. Directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, and starring Gwen Verdon, Sweet Charity's score included such upbeat songs as 'If My Friends Could See Me Now', 'I Love To Cry at Weddings' and 'The Rhythm of Life', alongside a number of other brassy solos and ensemble numbers. But the show's big hit, recorded by innumerable artists and recognisable from the first six brassy notes, was 'Big Spender', the dance hall girls' seductive call to their prospective customers.

The next produced musical from the Coleman-Fields partnership, Seesaw (1973), was Dorothy Fields' last show, as she died in 1974. This was an odd show that was almost, but not quite, a success. It was based on a two-character play, but expanded to accommodate the ensemble and production numbers a big musical seems to demand. The score was uneven, but includes two numbers that still receive an occasional airing: 'It's Not Where You Start (It's Where You Finish)' and the comic lament 'Nobody Does It Like Me'.

I Love My Wife (1977) was based on a French comedy and was about free love. Or tried to be. With the book and lyrics by Michael Stewart, the show ran for 857 performances, the longest run of Coleman's career to this point, but had a somewhat disappointing score. The main interest of the piece came from innovative staging, with members of the orchestra mingling with the actors and occasionally interacting with them.

Cy Coleman's next show, with veteran bookwriters/librettists Betty Comden and Adolph Green⁷, was the farce On the Twentieth Century (1978), based on the 1920s play and film Twentieth Century. The story concerns a washed-up theatrical director who attempts to woo back the star he discovered, becoming entangled with a religious maniac and a variety of wannabe playwrights while travelling across America on the eponymous train. Cy Coleman's score for the show is perhaps his most ambitious, written in a mock-operetta style with the rhythms echoing the rhythm of the train - even the overture starts with the sound of a train pulling away from the station. Robin Wagner's set, which included life-size and miniature trains, received a lot of praise, and the show won five Tony Awards, including Coleman's first award for Best Score.

Barnum (1980) reunited Coleman with Michael Stewart, and was another long-running success. The show is a biography of circus entrepreneur PT Barnum and included a cast of performers able to juggle, unicycle, tumble and walk the tightrope. A spectacle as much as a story, the show's heart was the relationship between PT and his wife Charity, originally played by Glenn Close. Their duet 'The Colors of My Life' was a quiet, simple song, a respite from the razzle-dazzle, and the show's most recognisable number. 'Come Follow the Band' and 'There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute' also gained recognition.

It would be nine years before Cy Coleman's next notable show (and his second Tony-winner) City of Angels (1989), which was set in 1940s Hollywood and included dual plots: the trials and tribulations of a writer of detective fiction attempting his first screenplay, and the movie itself, which was performed in black and white (set, costumes, etc). For this show, with a book by Larry Gelbart⁸ and lyrics by David Zippel⁹, Coleman wrote a period score including a number of novelty duets, some of them pairing a character from the real world with one from the movie. 'You Can Always Count On Me' is a self-deprecating song in the tradition of Seesaw's 'Nobody Does It Like Me', and the score also includes the torch song 'With Every Breath I Take', which has received a number of recordings outside of the show's two cast albums.

The final two of Coleman's musicals to reach Broadway during his lifetime were The Will Rogers Follies (1991), which was somewhat reminiscent of Barnum, and The Life (1997), which was set in the world of prostitution and included a near-operatic score. The Will Rogers Follies became Coleman's longest-running Broadway show, achieving 983 performances and earning him his final Tony award.

The End and the Future

Cy Coleman died of heart failure in November 2004. Various tributes to him were held by Broadway writers and performers over the next couple of months and his many collaborators expressed great feelings of loss.

However, because Coleman often had a number of projects on the go at once, there are a number of completed Coleman musicals which either remained unproduced or hadn't yet made their way towards Broadway or the West End by the time he died in November 2004. These include Pamela's First Musical, Like Jazz, The Great Ostrovsky, Grace (a bio-musical about Grace Kelly) and Lawyers, Lovers and Lunatics¹⁰. Left unfinished were scores for a passionate musical based on the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine and a number of other shows which almost reached Broadway at various points during Coleman's career. It seems that Coleman's music will be heard on the Great White Way even after his death, as a revival of Sweet Charity and the premiere of Like Jazz, a jazz musical about the jazz world, were both planned for 2005 productions when he passed away.

Although not as well-known as predecessors such as Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers, or contemporaries like Stephen Sondheim, Cy Coleman leaves a legacy of songs - including 'Witchcraft', 'The Best Is Yet To Come', 'Big Spender', 'You There in the Back Row' and 'The Colors of My Life' - and jazz recordings which ensure his place in the history of popular music composition.