A SAMPLING OF SCORES: Errol Flynn played the lead role in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” to an iconic score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The film is part of a new program focused on music at the Princeton Garden Theatre.
By Anne Levin
It’s hard to imagine the classic Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho without its score by Bernard Hermann. The same might be said of the 1933 version of King Kong minus its music by Max Steiner; or Lawrence of Arabia without its sweeping accompaniment by Maurice Jarre.
Music in the movies is the theme of “Keeping the Score,” a year-long series of screenings at the Princeton Garden Theatre presenting films with iconic music that is “a primary cinematic element which must be seen and heard in a theater,” reads a press release on the series.
The screenings begin March 13 with King Kong. Programming is scheduled through May 18; the remainder of the year is still being planned. more
When I realized last Saturday was George Washington’s birthday, I looked up former president Bill Clinton’s foreword to Shakespeare in America (Library of America 2013), which refers to Washington leaving the “legislative haggling” at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to see a production of The Tempest, which, as editor James Shapiro points out, was “based on the story of the wreck of the Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda in 1609.” The 42nd president — who remembers a high school assignment requiring him to memorize 100 lines from Macbeth, among them “Life’s but a walking shadow” (“an important early lesson in the perils of blind ambition”) — makes sure to mention the time presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson visited Stratford-upon-Avon. Later in the book, as Abigail Adams recalls, Jefferson “fell upon the ground and kissed it” while Adams “cut a relic from a chair claimed to have belonged to Shakespeare himself.”
