Marvin Hamlisch, the Pro\'s Pro

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

3:52 p.m. | Updated How fitting that Marvin Hamlisch, a one-time rehearsal pianist for countless singers and dancers, should have created the vamp of all Broadway musical vamps for “A Chorus Line.” That vamp, set to words by Edward Kleban as the song “One,” is the thematic thread and engine of a show whose score would not have cohered without it. This motif, so elemental that it seems to have existed forever, is the catapult behind everything else in the show.

So why is Mr. Hamlisch, who died on Monday at 68, routinely overlooked when people are invited to name the greatest Broadway composers? One reason may be that he embodied a kind of ultimate professionalism. Personal self-expression wasn't at the top of his agenda. Solving problems and doing solid work were more important. His tunes for his second most successful show, “They're Playing Our Song,” with lyrics by Carol e Bayer Sager, were the perfect musical equivalent of Neil Simon's banter.

“A Chorus Line” certainly deserved its Tony Award for best musical score. But Mr. Hamlisch's contribution is so structurally embedded in its fabric that aside from “One,” the show's only “hit” is the appealing but unremarkable ballad “What I Did For Love,” a song that did the job it was meant to do and not much more.

Ultimate professionalism for Mr. Hamlisch meant conducting pops orchestras with vigor and clarity, writing polished, unobtrusive film scores and popular songs, few of them great. Creative lightning struck with “The Way We Were,” in which his chemistry with the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Barbra Streisand yielded one of the all-time great movie songs. But when the same team tried to catch lightning again in the 1990's with the inspirational ballad “Ordinary Miracles,” their effort sounded hollow and forced.

I interviewed Mr. Hamlisch in 1986 around the time of his musical “Smile,” a collaboration with Howard Ashman based on the 1975 Michael Richie movie about a beauty pageant. Another Hamlisch musical about the life of the actress Jean Seberg had closed in London two years earlier, and he was still hoping to resurrect it and bring it to New York. I had the fantasy that both shows would be hits and Mr. Hamlisch would become the new king of Broadway, taking back the crown from Andrew Lloyd Webber. It didn't happen.

Mr. Hamlisch had no illusions that “Jean Seberg” was hit-bound. He sensed that Seberg's troubled life story was too dark a subject for a Broadway show. “Smile,” although smart, and well made, quickly bombed. There was lightning around it, but it never reached the ground. When you have interviewed all the creators of a show and seen firsthand how hard they worked, you feel their hurt. Professionalism and electricity: you can't have one without the othe r.