(3 of 6)
Their first musicomedy was the Columbia Varsity Show of 1920 written in Rodger's freshman year. Soon after Rodgers quit Columbia, and for five years the two of them plugged along, getting a few shots at Broadway, but no lucky ones. Then in 1925 the Theatre Guild, wanting some tapestries for its new theatre and a chance to give its understudies a workout, decided to put on an informal little revue, engaged Rodgers to write the music. Hart came in on the lyrics. The show, under the title of the Garrick Gaities, opened May 17, 1925, ran for 211 performances. People hummed Sentimental Me and Manhattan, music publishers enthusiastically bought from Rodgers & Hart the very songs they had sniffed at a year before, and Broadway producers yelled for shows.
Words & Music. Good taste and an unquenchably romantic point of view are the common denominators of most of the 1,000 songs Rodgers & Hart have written together. Larry Hart did not originate sophisticated lyrics. William Schwenk Gilbert was 48 years and many a smart jingle ahead of him. Richard Rodgers is not the first man to write melodies that get inside of people and do something to them. Franz Lehar could still give him a lesson in Schmalzmusik. But a song is words and music, and nobody ever fused words and music more effectively than Rodgers & Hart. When Rodgers' melodic line expresses gaiety, sadness, humor, Hart's lyrical line invariably complements and fulfills it. The lyrical slant may not be as sophisticated or clever as Cole Porter's. The melody may resort to chromatic tricks that such a perfect craftsman as Vincent Youmans would reject as unsound. But a Rodgers & Hart song usually has the power of a single musical expression, which not even such a pair of individual talents as P. G. Wodehouse & Jerome Kern could ever quite pull off.
There is one further quality that Rodgers brings to his music which perhaps gives him the edge over such peers as Irving Berlin, Arthur Schwartz, Walter Donaldson, Kern, Youmans and great and gaudy Hollywood hack teams like Warren & Dubin and Robin & Rainger. Richard Rodgers is not only the master of a tonal palette filled with surprise and delight, but he is constantly at search for new forms across the known boundaries of his medium. The dream music for Peggy-Ann, and twelve years later for Married An Angel, the "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" ballet music for On Your Toes, the march of the clowns in Jumbo, while probably causing Richard Strauss no alarm for his laurels, are imaginative and charming be yond the accepted standards of musicomedy music.
In the 13 years since the Gar rick Gaieties, Rodgers & Hart have livened Manhattan with such hits as Dearest Enemy, Peggy-Ann, The Girl Friend, A Connecticut Yankee, and the five-in-a-row of the last three years. They have livened the whole U. S. with such songs as My Heart Stood Still, Ten Cents a Dance, Blue Moon, I've Got Five Dollars, There's a Small Hotel, With a Song in My Heart (Rodgers' favorite composition), The Lady Is a Tramp. In the 13 years, their shows have played everywhere from Wales to New South Wales. And they themselves have gone, more than once, to Hollywood.