Quotes of the Day

It's one of the theater's lingering legends: how two men in middle-age, one with his career in tatters, the other about to lose the only partner he'd had for 20 years, joined forces to invent an art form. In 1943, Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist, and Richard Rodgers, songwriter, took a failed play from the previous decade and turned it into "Oklahoma!", a show that ran forever. Why, at the George Gershwin Theatre, it's running today — on Rodgers' 100th birthday.

The centenary is getting the big Broadway treatment. The Gershwin has a free Rodgers concert at noon (just try to get in!) that features Barbara Cook, Lea Salonga and the "Oklahoma!" chorus. A new biography of the composer, Meryle Secrest's "Somewhere for Me," provides helpful personal background for the hundreds of newspaper and magazine tributes published this week; see especially John Lahr's cogent analysis in The New Yorker. Tomorrow night, PBS airs a documentary, "Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds." There will hardly be a concert hall or high-school stage from which his pretty chants and chirps cannot be heard.

Really, that's been the case forever for almost 80 years. Rodgers was born June 28, 1902 (the same day as John Dillinger!). A Manhattan doctor's son, he was schooled at Columbia University, which he attended for the sole purpose of writing the Varsity Show. He composed his first signature hit — "Manhattan," with his first lyricist partner Lorenz Hart — when he was just turning 20. Rodgers and Hart wrote snazzy, sophisticated shows that produced seven #1 pop hits, including "There's a Small Hotel," "Where Or When" and "Blue Moon" (which hit the top twice, once with a Glen Gray rendition in 1935 and again with the Marcels' doo-wop version in 1961). His teaming with Hammerstein gave Perry Como three #1 hits ("Some Enchanted Evening," "Hello, Young Lovers" and "No Other Love" from the TV documentary "Victory at Sea"). In his 60s Rodgers saw the film version of "The Sound of Music" become the top box-office attraction of all time, not eclipsed till "Star Wars" a dozen years later.

In the past eight years, five Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals — "Carousel," "State Fair," "The King and I," "The Sound of Music" and now "Oklahoma!" — have been lavishly restaged on Broadway; this fall, a sixth, "Flower Drum Song," is due. Television has recently and reverently revived "South Pacific" (with Glenn Close) and their 1957 TV musical "Cinderella" (with Whitney Houston and Brandy). In 1999 there was, for no reason at all, a cartoon-feature version of "The King and I." But Rodgers doesn't need scenery and costumes to stay alive in the communal heart. Every moment of every day, his tunes are sung in cabarets, movies and countless bathroom showers.

For the vast pop music audience, Rodgers' legacy is that of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Those famous shows made the duo a mystical musical brand name: R&H. In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many of their songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the Eisenhower-era listener's ear that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century. Back then, our true national anthem was "You'll Never Walk Alone" (at least until that secular spiritual was twisted into permanent parody when sung every Labor Day by an exhausted Jerry Lewis at the end of his telethon). R&H was unashamedly upbeat: whistling a happy tune, raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. The tunes were so diligently soaring and the lyrics so wholesome that, while you listened to them, they practically brushed your teeth and did your homework for you.

That effluence of feeling was Hammerstein's doing more than Rodgers'. As John McPhee wrote in TIME upon the lyricist's death in 1960: "Whether he was writing about Austrian folk singers, New England factory workers or a Siamese king, there was always a steady undertone of old-fashioned American positivism in Hammerstein's lyrics. As he frequently admitted, 'I just can't write anything without hope in it'." If hope is a thing with feathers, Hammerstein was a whole aviary. His Hallmark poetry was orgiastically (but cannily) sentimental. As was he. "He was in love with his work," McPhee wrote, "and when he heard his songs in the theater, he would often rush to the lobby to weep unreservedly. Once, after watching a revival of 'Carousel,' he cried all night."

So Hammerstein was a sop. But he wasn't the only one to be swept by emotion on hearing the music he helped create; that overflow was felt by millions of people. It may have defined what they thought music, and not just popular music, was capable of. I remember experiencing that fullness of feeling as I came home from a showing of the film "Carousel" at the Avalon (N.J.) Theatre in the summer of 1956. Alone at midnight, bicycling giddily down that resort-town boardwalk, this kid of 12 was instructively dizzied by the grand music, the grandiloquent phrases, the poignance of a love expressed perfectly only after death. (So I was a sop too.) R&H had the intended impact on me: they made me feel better, worthier, more American.

RODG AND HAM

Before R&H, there was R&H. Before Hammerstein was Larry Hart, Rodgers' partner for the 20-plus years that preceded "Oklahoma!" Since to me the Rodgers and Hart songs are more mature and worldly-wise than some of the swooning-schoolgirl compositions in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon, I'm going to pretend that Hart came second, and get to him next week. But for a quick sketch of the composer and his "second wife" (or husband), attend to Ethan Mordden's characteristically illuminating study, "Rodgers & Hammerstein": "Hammerstein was operetta: majestic, committed, passionate. Rodgers was musical comedy: trim, sassy, come-as-you-are. Rodgers was ballet versus hoofing, kids putting on a show in a barn, a spoof of the New Deal. And Rodgers was above all contemporary, right on the money with what was urban, jazzy, smart. Hammerstein was a pioneer: of a form that had died in the 1930s."

This poet of the dropped "g" and the studied slang ("We're only sayin' / You're doin' fine, Oklahoma! / Oklahoma, O.K.!"), was a wealthy, Manhattan-born scion of the American theater. His grandfather Oscar had built opera houses all over the country. After graduation from Columbia University, Oscar II dropped out of law school to work for his uncle, a famous theater manager. The stage bug bit Oscar, and the welt never healed. In the 20s Hammerstein, as lyricist and book writer, had four solid hits with four different composers: Vincent Youmans' "Wildflower" (1923, 477 performances in its original run), Sigmund Romberg's "The Desert Song" (1926, 471 performances), Rudolf Friml's "Rose-Marie" (1927, 557 performances) and Jerome Kern's "Show Boat" (1927, 572 performances).

The major credit for that epochal riverboat epic went to Kern, but Hammerstein supplied the lyrics — except for the interpolated song "Bill," by Kern and P.G. Wodehouse — and the overarching ambition to bring a sweeping, coherent story line to Broadway at a time when most musicals dithering in narrative frivol. A famous anecdote illustrates the librettist-lyricist's importance. The wives of Kern and Hammerstein were at a party where a woman complimented Mrs. Kern on writing "Ol' Man River." Replied Mrs. H.: "Her husband wrote ?Da, da, da-drum.' My husband wrote 'Ol' Man River'."

By 1942, though, Hammerstein was Ol' Man Reject. His shows were closing after a few weeks; his Hollywood sojourn was a long exercise in humiliations. Then a series of accidents changed his career. Theresa Helburn, a director of The Theatre Guild, caught a Westport Theatre revival of Lynn Riggs' 1931 play "Green Grow the Lilacs," with interpolated folk songs and a square dance choreographed by Gene Kelly, the young star of Rogers' "Pal Joey" from the year before. Helburn thought a full musical treatment might be the ideal expression for the yearnings of Oklahoma cowboy and ranchers in a territory on the cusp of statehood. She interested Rodgers in the project, and he brought in Hammerstein. What was at first called "Away We Go! A Musical Comedy" matured, under Hammerstein's seriousness and Rodgers' suddenly full-throated sonorousness, into "Oklahoma! A Musical Play."

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 cliché 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.

• Richard Corliss
• On his hundredth birthday, the great songs and big shows are still bustin' out all over