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Legend has it that some knowing New Yorkers, visiting New Haven to catch the tryout, came back skeptical; impresario Mike Todd's verdict was "No gags, no gals, no chance." That may have been because Hammerstein was closely pursuing Riggs' dramatic line, and because choreographer Agnes de Mille had disdained the usual practice of hiring the creative team's girl friends as chorus girls; she needed real dancers. R&H also decided to open the show, not with the usual loud, peppy ensemble of chorines (put all your pretty wares out early, and give the late-comers a chance to find their seats without distracting overmuch from the milling onstage), but with a solitary voice singing "Oh, what a beautiful morning!" By the end of tryouts, Rodgers was able to say at a late-night production meeting, "Do you know what's wrong with this show? Nothing. Now everybody pipe down and let's go to bed."
"Oklahoma" was a history-making smash, running 2,212 performances on Broadway (more than the aggregate number for Hammerstein's four 20s hits) and lasting in road companies for an amazing 10-1/2 years, until 1954, when the movie version was already in production to extend the franchise even further, on and on into cultural history. Until Hammerstein's death, R&H would work together, more or less exclusively — establishing the model for the blockbuster musical and, artistically, at first refining, then calcifying, their idea of the serious musical play.
They did it brilliantly in the even more ambitious "Carousel." (I may have been a sop at 12, but I knew my musical theater.) "Oklahoma!", under its trappings of Western saga, had basically been about whether wholesome cowboy Curly or surly ranch-hand Jud would take Laurey, the sun-ripened niece of a farm woman, to the barn dance. Billy Bigelow, the flawed hero of "Carousel," was closer to Jud than Curly. He's a bit of a brute to his best girl Julie ("Who says I beat her? I hit her once!") and a botcher of his best intentions, even after dying and getting the chance to come back to earth for emotional atonement. Around this sullen love story, R&H wove some gorgeous, delicate, sturdy threads: a 22-min. conversation in song between Billy and Julie (including the sweet-sad ballad "If I Loved You") and Billy's 7-1/2min. "Soliloquy," a stubborn man's argument with himself. The young leads of "Carousel," John Raitt and Jan Clayton, brought unforced magic to this doomed duo.
HAM ON WRY
After "Carousel," the R&H hits kept on coming, though not with the same relentless predictability. Of their first five Broadway shows, four ("Oklahoma!", "Carousel," "South Pacific," "The King and I") were enduring hits, and just one a flop (the sour, "Our Town"-ish "Allegro"). Of their last four ("Me and Juliet," "Pipe Dream," "Flower Drum Song," "The Sound of Music"), only "The Sound of Music" stayed firmly in the repertory. Perhaps Hammerstein found it harder to attach his golly-gee sentiment to the bitter-sweet or tragic stories he chose to tell. But he never stopped injecting it into the later musical plays. "Oklahoma!" was past, but in Hammerstein's lyrics Okla-hokum lived on.
Before R&H, the Broadway musical had been an indoor sport. Hammerstein yanked it into the wide world outside. Staring out the window of his Doylestown, Pa., farmhouse, he wrote the first words of the first song in the first Rodgers and Hammerstein show: "There's a bright golden haze on the meadow." From "Oklahoma!" on, Nature runs rampant through his lyrics, and the corn is as high as a elephant's eye. From "Carousel": "June is bustin' out all over! / The feelin' is gettin' so intense / That the young Virginia creepers / Hev been huggin' the bejeepers / Outa all the mornin'-glories on the fence." This may have sounded fresh and inviting when first performed; some listeners may find it affecting today. But a surfeit of this bucolic apostrophizin' (and apostrophe-in'), an' ye'll be hevvin' a case of the dry heaves.
Hammerstein's lyrics had always searched for the semblance of simplicity. As the "Show Boat" heroine Magnolia sang, "Fish got to swim, birds got to fly/ I got to love one man till I die" In the Rodgers musicals, the Hammerstein heroine went further. She was a cockeyed optimist in a sticky situation: a World War II outpost ("South Pacific"), forbidding Siam ("The King and I"), Nazi Germany ("The Sound of Music"). She expects, or expects to make, the best from the worst: "When you walk through a storm, hold you head up high." "Whenever I feel afraid/ I hold my head erect/ And whistle a happy tune/ So no one will suspect/ I'm afraid." "Climb ev'ry mountain, / Ford every stream, / Follow every rainbow / Till you find your dream." Hammerstein lyrics are so defiantly heart-wrenching, you may suspect that he kept that tool in his Doylestown shed: a heart wrench, to be used an as instrument or healing or torture.
To Hammerstein, poetry was upfront allusion. He let a simile be his umbrella ("I'm as corny as Kansas in August"; "I'm as restless as a willow in a windstorm") and loved to semaphore metaphors ("You are the promised kiss of springtime"). Again, that's fine in judicious doses, especially if the singer is a schoolteacher like "Anna in the King and I," or a performing mom like Maria in "The Sound of Music." But Hammerstein forced nearly all his characters, whatever their class, to speak like greeting-card bards. A wartime sailor sings, "Younger than springtime am I/ Gayer than laughter am I." Cowboy Curly muses, "All the sounds of the earth are like music." Sociopathic Jud dreams of a girl — "And her long, yeller hair/ Falls across my face/ Just like the rain in a storm." Tough Billy considers whaling, where the boat will rock "Like a dear little baby in a bassinet," and he can "climb aloft and be/ The very first to see/ The chrysanthemum spout come out o' the snout of a whale."
I'd hate anyone to think I'm saying that Hammerstein was only an a tapper of treacle — especially if that anyone were Mary Corliss, my own wonderful gal, who grew up enchanted by the R&H musicals and as a high-school senior wrote her thesis on them. I too am susceptible to Hammerschlock (editor, strike that for the sake of marital amity!). The man could put wit in his rhymes, as in the four hard "a" sounds in "A Wonderful Guy," all hitting the waltz downbeat: "...and as gay as a daisy in May, a clich coming true." He yoked some black humor from the "Oklahoma!" scene where Curly tries to persuade Jud he'll be loved by the town if he just kills himself and has a fancy funeral: "He looks like he's asleep. / It's a shame that he won't keep. / But it's summer and we're runnin' out of ice." And in some of the ballads, like the majestic "Something Wonderful," the lyrics sit like a smart little brother in the lap of Rodgers' beautiful melody that they create a perfect portrait of wistfulness.
Rodgers was not far wrong when he wrote this, in a preface to the 1949 publication of "Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II": "The real reason for the publication of this book is that they are wonderful words, that they sing well of this country, and that they form a long and lasting part of our song heritage." And Hammerstein was truest to his place in that heritage when he wrote, for "Allegro": "It takes all kinds of people to make up a world.../ All kinds of people and things/ And, brother, I'll tell you my hunch:/ Whether you like them or whether you don't/ You're stuck with the whole damn bunch." Every time we surrender to a swooping Rogers melody, or whistle one of their happy tunes, every time we mist up despite ourselves at a Hammerstein lyric, we're stuck with them. And stuck to them, forever.