Rewriting the dictionary of the Broadway Musical
by Sheridan Morley
Rodgers and Hart
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Rodgers and Hammerstein with Julie Andrews during preparations
for the live telecast of CINDERELLA in 1957
for the live telecast of CINDERELLA in 1957
Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner in
the original 1951 Broadway production of THE KING AND I
the original 1951 Broadway production of THE KING AND I
In the history of the American musical theatre and cinema he has no true equal. The statistics speak for themselves: here are just a few. Rodgers wrote forty Broadway musicals (among them twenty-six with Hart and nine with Hammerstein); one Broadway play, three London musicals (all with Hart), ten original movie musicals (nine with Hart, one with Hammerstein), two television musicals, the scores for two television documentaries, a ballet and one nightclub revue. His Broadway musicals have played more than 25 thousand performances worldwide, which works out at an aggregate run of more than fifty consecutive years. Even now, some twenty years after his death in December 1979, somewhere in the world the sound of his music is heard on stage every night of the year; of no other American composer can that be said.
But what do we really know of Richard Rodgers ? That he was born June 28th 1902 in New York, the son of a well-to-do doctor; by 1916 he had written a couple of school-camp songs ("Dear Old Wigwam" and "Camp-Fire Days") and a year later his first complete amateur score, One Minute, Please. By 1919 he was writing with Lorenz Hart, and by 1920 their first show, Poor Little Ritz Girl was on Broadway, where Rodgers was to stay for the next 55 years.
The shows that he wrote with Lorenz Hart reflected Hart's urbane, jazzy, quicksilver wit: unlike Rodgers, a paternalistic family man for all his adult life, Hart was unreliable and a near-impossible partner, one who would only ever get down to work just after the final deadline had been called. Yet something of their opposite natures attracted: the shows they wrote together, from the 1925 Garrick Gaieties through A Connecticut Yankee and Evergreen to On Your Toes and The Boys From Syracuse and the 1940 Pal Joey, which introduced the modern musical in all its downbeat decay, (this was the first musical ever to feature a heel as hero, and made an overnight star of Gene Kelly), were the scores that brought Broadway from the end of World War One into the run-up to World War Two.
1942, the 40th year of Rodgers' life, reflected a significant and (though he could not have known it at the time) a neat half-way mark in both his career and his time on earth. In that pivotal year, Rodgers shed one collaborator while taking on another. For several years leading up to that crisis point, it was clear that his friend and partner, Lorenz Hart, was not only slowly going down but was liable to take Rodgers with him. In despair, Rodgers turned to a trusted old friend from his school days, Oscar Hammerstein II. Though his career could have used the boost of a partnership with Rodgers, Hammerstein put the needs of others first; he urged Rodgers to stand by Hart, and to continue working with him, though Hammerstein offered to step in (anonymously) should Hart not be up to the task. And, Hammerstein quietly urged, when the opportunity arose, Rodgers and Hammerstein should write a show together. That opportunity came along when the Theatre Guild asked Rodgers & Hart to musicalise a play about the American West called Green Grow the Lilacs. Coincidentally, Hammerstein had expressed interest in this work as well, and so joined forces with Rodgers & Hart to serve as the book writer to their score.
The triumvirate was not to last; Hart dropped out of the project, claiming that cowboy hats and gingham were not for him. This temporary breach in the Rodgers & Hart years lead to the first collaboration of what would become the Rodgers & Hammerstein era: Oklahoma! It would redefine the American musical theatre and it would redirect the entire second half of the life and work of Richard Rodgers.
(Following the opening of Oklahoma! in March of 1943, Hammerstein was to write one more work on his own - the all-black revision of Bizet's Carmen called Carmen Jones - while Rodgers, in a desperate attempt to keep Hart on track, produced a revised version of their 1927 musical comedy lark, A Connecticut Yankee. In the short run, his work therapy worked on Hart, but once Yankee was revised and Hart's work finished, the lyricist's demons returned. A Connecticut Yankee opened 17 November 1943 and Lorenz Hart died 5 days later. For the next 17 years, Rodgers would work exclusively with Oscar Hammerstein II.)
Those who wrote off his second partner Oscar Hammerstein II as a sentimentalist, the other side of the more cynical Hart coin, needed to look a little closer at the shows he was now writing with Rodgers: Oklahoma! and Carousel are centrally about death (and in the case of Carousel, wife-beating), South Pacific is about racial intolerance, and only perhaps in the last Rodgers-Hammerstein score, The Sound of Music, is there the sweet, sugary sound of which they were often wrongly accused, and even there Nazis are a central element of plot. The truth is that Rodgers' scores, whether written with Hart or Hammerstein, were always more contentious and complex and multi-layered than critics first realised. Although Rodgers' family heritage was Russian Jewish, he had acquired an all-American quality which set him apart from the multitude of middle-European songwriter refugees on the run from Russian or German oppression. But although he seemed to stand for Middle America, there was a sharpness about his scores, and the hills were by no means always alive with the sound of sentimental, feelgood shows.
After Hammerstein died, Rodgers wrote both words and music for No Strings, which courageously (for its 1962 premiere) paired a white leading man with a black leading lady; then came Do I Hear a Waltz?, written shortly after Hammerstein's death with his pupil Stephen Sondheim, and although Rodgers' last three scores (Two By Two, Rex and I Remember Mama) did not find critical or public favour in a new era of Hair and Godspell, all those scores seem to me ripe for rediscovery.
Richard Rodgers built his shows and his songs to last; not unlike the dramatist Arthur Miller, he was a carpenter who believed in craftsmanship above all else, and frequently drew his musical inspiration from deep in the soil of his native America. If a line can be traced from Aaron Copland, whose Rodeo led Rodgers to the discovery of the choreographer Agnes de Mille and Oklahoma!, then in some curious way it stops again at Rodgers.
He was not a playboy, and he had little offstage interest in the Broadway life; but he alone in his time wrote for the American heartland. First with Pal Joey and then again a few years later with Oklahoma!, he rewrote the dictionary of the Broadway musical, and of that art form he was perhaps the last great composer before it fragmented and darkened with the century he celebrated.
Broadway musicals live on, but never in quite the way he conceived them; what Rodgers wrote were show tunes for a time when radio and recordings made them universal. That just does not happen anymore, not in New York, not in London, not anywhere. Rodgers WAS the sound of music; it really is that simple, and what follows in these pages is the evidence. (Sheridan Morley is the drama critic of the Spectator and the International Herald Tribune; his many books include the authorised first biographies of Noel Coward and John Gielgud, as well as the recent CENTURY OF THEATRE written with Ruth Leon. He is also the author of books about Stephen Sondheim and the history of the West End musical).
