RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN :The Showmen

Each had already made his mark--but as collaborators they created musical theater that enchanted audiences and redefined the art form

By Andrew Lloyd Webber Monday, June 08, 1998

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    Rodgers was always keen on breaking new ground. Many believe Pal Joey (1940), the story of the emcee of a sleazy nightclub, to be a landmark musical. With its unscrupulous leading character and bitingly realistic view of life, the show moved the musical-comedy format into more serious territory. But even as Rodgers and Hart were taking the musical to new levels, their partnership was becoming increasingly strained. Hart was a serious drinker, and by the time of his last collaboration with Rodgers, By Jupiter in 1942, he was virtually an alcoholic. Rodgers was desperate. No one was more forthcoming with help than his old friend Oscar Hammerstein II.

    Hammerstein was born in New York City on July 12, 1895. His father William was a theatrical manager; his grandfather Oscar I, a legendary impresario who took on the Metropolitan Opera by building his own opera house. The young Oscar was stagestruck from childhood, and by the time he attended Columbia University, he was performing and writing amateur routines. It was after the Saturday matinee of a college varsity revue that he first met Rodgers, whose older brother brought him to the show. Years later, remembering this meeting, Hammerstein wrote, "Behind the sometimes too serious face of an extraordinarily talented composer...I see a dark-eyed little boy."

    Like Rodgers, Hammerstein was keen to push the boundaries of the musical, which was only slightly more sophisticated than a vaudeville revue. In the program of his 1924 Broadway show Rose-Marie, for instance, he and the other authors wrote that the musical numbers were too integral to the book to list separately. Three years later, with Jerome Kern, he had his biggest success with Show Boat, the musical he adapted from Edna Ferber's novel of the same name with the express intention of weaving songs seamlessly into a narrative about addictive gambling, alcoholism and miscegenation. Years later, Hammerstein dealt with racial issues again in South Pacific.

    By the time Rodgers and Hammerstein were discussing the Hart crisis, the 46-year-old Hammerstein was considered something of a has-been. He had a string of flops to his name. Famously, after the successful debut of Oklahoma! he took an advertisement in Variety listing all his recent catastrophes with the punch line: "I've done it before and I can do it again!"

    The announcement that Rodgers and Hammerstein were to collaborate on Oklahoma!--the Theatre Guild production based on Lynn Riggs' novel Green Grow the Lilacs--was initially greeted with skepticism. The financial backing for Away We Go! (as the show was then called) proved very difficult to raise. MGM, which owned the dramatic rights, refused to make a $69,000 investment for half the profits. The word on the tryout in New Haven, Conn., was awful. One of Walter Winchell's informants wired the columnist: "No girls, no legs, no jokes, no chance."

    But on March 31, 1943, Oklahoma! opened in triumph on Broadway. A show that began with a lone woman churning butter onstage to the strains of an offstage voice singing Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' captivated its first-night audience. This revolutionary, naturalistic musical also changed the mainstream of the genre forever.

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