The opening of Show Boat on December 27, 1927, doubtlessly stunned audiences with its atypical realism. Already that year, New Yorkers had attended a number of tuneful new openings, many involving chase scenes. Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy’s Rio Rita followed the plight of a bank robber being hunted down through Texas. At the Belasco, the rousing Hit the Deck by Vincent Youmans, Clifford Grey and Leo Robin was built around a smitten female coffee shop owner, named Looloo, running after a sailor halfway around the globe. At the Alvin Theatre, the Gershwin brothers enjoyed second-time success with another Fred and Adele Astaire smash, Funny Face—which included a frantic chase through New Jersey to the Atlantic City Pier. B. G. DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson brought a disarming football campus show, Good News, to the 4th Street Theatre, while Richard Rodgers, Larry Hart and Herbert Fields graced the Vanderbilt with their biggest Broadway success to date, A Connecticut Yankee, from which the public first heard “My Heart Stood Still” and “Thou Swell.”
Then came the daring new musical about black folk all sweating it out on the Big River while the white folk lived it up in old plantation parlors and gardens. Although Show Boat marked a collaborative high point for its two creators, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, it was Hammerstein’s contribution in particular that made it a show for the ages. Many musicals with equally great scores do not succeed. It is usually the book that determines the ultimate reputation if not the lasting entertainment value of a work. And no single person in the history of musical theatre did more to advance its development and make of it a distinctly American art form than did Mr. Hammerstein. Simple, deep, compassionately poetic, without his family connections in the theatre world (his grandfather enjoyed a major producing career), he could just as easily have become a carpenter or railroad switchman, an accountant or history professor. Hammerstein’s instinctive genius grew and blossomed out of two sources: European-rooted operettas in which he was trained, and his own basic humanity.
Those who knew him closely were amused by his rural mannerisms, so oddly out of place did they appear in the profession he chose to pursue. Indeed, Mr. Hammerstein could have lived the lives of his most fundamental protagonists—the riverboat Negroes who labored stoically from sunrise to sunset; the troubled social outcast and misfit of Oklahoma, Jud Fry; or the offbeat, self-taught marine biologist, Doc, of Pipe Dream, living humbly on the edge of life with ne’er-do-wells and cathouse madames. Hammerstein possessed a profound identification with the common man, which would essentially inspire the movement he led to make the characters in musical plays more like the down-to-earth neighbors of middle American cities and small towns.
Years later, when he was asked to comment on criticism that his work tended towards the corny, Hammerstein’s ingenious reply was to answer that so was life. And six months before his death, he summed up his philosophy to Canadian radio interviewer Tony Thomas: “I think it’s terribly important that some people like me must exist to keep affirming the beauties of life to offset others, even more eloquent, perhaps, who are decrying life and scoffing at it and telling you what’s wrong with it. Surely there are things that are wrong, but then we must also admit that there are things that are right and beautiful and make it wonderful to be on earth. And this, if it isn’t my mission, is at least one of my chief aims.”1
Soft spoken and gentle by nature, on the awkward side socially, towering in height and lumbering in self-effacing humanity (at least in public), Hammerstein yet displayed a brilliant faculty for words both simple and complex, for understated rhyme schemes, and for direct and lucid philosophical content. In him the theatre realized its own poet laureate. Known for shunning parties or, when trapped in one, kindly retreating out the door well before it was over, and for solitary walks through the backwoods of his serene Pennsylvania farm while pondering plot lines and honing lyrics, Hammerstein had far more important things up his sleeve than run-of-the-mill tuners stocked with high flying dames and dandies.
Young Oscar started out as a stage manager, supervising his Uncle Arthur’s operettas. Luckily he learned the tricky art of libretto construction through family connections, getting teamed up with veteran librettist-lyricist Otto Harbach, 24 years his senior. Considered by Alan Jay Lerner to be one of the most underrated figures who ever labored in musical theatre, Harbach, whose real name was Hauerbach, was born into a Mormon family of Danish descent in Salt Lake City in 1873.2 He worked his way through college, taught at Whitman College in Washington State, then enrolled in graduate courses at Columbia University. Dazzled by a billboard ad touting a Weber and Fields show starring Fay Templeton in 1906, Harbach took an interest in musicals. He penned the words for “Cuddle Up a Little Closer” and landed script-writing jobs through the war years, eventually winding up in the office of Max Dreyfus. Referring to Harbach as “my dear friend and erstwhile tutor,” Hammerstein credited him as being “the best play analyst I ever met…. He taught me to think a long time before actually writing.”3
By the time he took up with Hammerstein, Harbach had written the book and lyrics for a handful of shows, from Madame Sherry, with music by Karl Hoschna (which gave us “Every Little Moment”), to Rudolf Friml’s Firefly, produced by Arthur Hammerstein in 1912, to Going Up, a resilient 351-performance hit at the Liberty Theatre, for which Louis A. Hirsch composed most of the tunes, Irving Berlin the rest. Harbach turned out the hugely successful Wildflower in 1923 at the Casino Theatre, with his young collaborator Oscar Hammerstein assisting on both book and lyrics, Vincent Youmans and Herbert Stothart composing the music. In 1924, Harbach and Hammerstein provided similar services for Rudolf Friml’s Rose Marie, for which, again, the relatively unknown Stothart supplied additional music.
Show Boat inspired five major revivals to play New York stages and three movie versions including, in 1929, one of the first part-talkies. Seen here in the 1946 revival are, from left, Ralph Dumke as Captain Andy, Carole Bruce as Julie La Verne, and Robert Allen as Steve Baker.
Destined to suffer, just the same, the crushing vicissitudes of life in the theatre, Oscar would flounder mightily along the way to success. Still, he harbored a burning belief in the controlling importance of the libretto as the vehicle most able to sustain an audience’s attention span over the course of three hours.
Actually, no musical is a play alone. It is the infinitely complex amalgamation of three major elements: book, score and production, the latter comprising not only the direction, cast, sets, costumes, orchestrations, etc., but the image-building power of the producer’s promotional and advertising campaign. While many shows might succeed on the strength of two of these three crucial components, few would ever survive on only one. A fine set of songs alone will rarely carry the evening. Neither will a good book, nor, with rare exceptions, a production. Ideally, all need each other. Rarely are they of equal strength.
Showmanship. Songs. Stories. These remained the ever-elusive elements with which a century of gifted creators would wrestle. If there is a key, a magic formula, to guarantee success, no one has yet discovered it. In Show Boat, perhaps the greatest of all American musicals, Hammerstein demonstrated how a serious topic can be made appealing if it is conveyed in hummable songs and by likable characters caught up in dramatic situations. Others will contend that Jerome Kern’s music is what really made the show so indestructibly enduring. By the most blessed stroke of luck, Hammerstein, only 31 years old, joined forces with the theatre’s most advanced composer. Hammerstein and Kern had begun their association only two years earlier with the immensely popular Sunny. Kern’s flexibility and eclecticism (his repertoire included cakewalks, stentorian ballads, blues, jazz dances, and Viennese waltzes) would well serve the narrative’s shifting tones and tensions as it expanded forward in time over a forty year period in American history.
It was Jerome Kern who, only halfway through reading the new novel Show Boat by Edna Ferber in the fall of 1926, called up Oscar and said, “I think it would be great for us to make a show of this.”4 Oscar, who would end up in life feeling boundless affection for his collaborator, once stating that Jerry Kern “had a greater grip on my whole being than anyone else I have known,” went out and bought a copy of the book, and accepted the invitation in a timely fashion.5 They lavished unusual attention on the project, nurturing it through a difficult editing journey out of town. With the show one hour and forty-five minutes too long in D.C., cuts were furiously implemented. In Philadelphia, three scenes and eight songs were deleted. In Pittsburgh, believing that Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal needed a second act duet, Jerry and Oscar penned “Why Do I Love You?”
Steeped in the most fundamental ongoing American conflict—the story’s central theme of miscegenation haunts the sprawling narrative—so realistic were Show Boat’s characters and dramatic situations that Abel Green, covering opening night for Variety, wondered if music and lyrics were even necessary: “Meaty and gripping, rich with plot and character, it’s almost a pity the Edna Ferber novel wasn’t dramatized ‘straight,’ sans the musical setting.” Granting the inevitable, Green spotted history in the making: “But, musicalized and Ziegfeldized, it’s worthy, sturdy entertainment. It has everything, and tops everything ever done by Ziegfeld. It has story, music, production, casting and consistent entertainment from 8:30 to 11:30 curtains, and in a show which defies fidgeting as the conventional zero hour of theatre curtain time approaches. One forgets the clock.”6
Show Boat had not just a great story and score. It had a great production, too. Its unlikely presenter, the flamboyant Florenz Ziegfeld, had routinely confined his efforts to lavish revues laden with popular songs, beautiful dancing girls, and leading comics of the day. In a rare act of theatrical courage, Ziegfeld took a fancy to the Kern and Hammerstein work and invested it with his showmanly flair. Historian Gerald Bordman points out the importance of the Ziegfeld touch to the show’s initial success. In addition to the principal and supporting players, the 1927 production boasted “a chorus of ninety six, and surrounding the cast were Joseph Urban’s eye-filling sets.”7 The verities of the stage abound: To think that Ziegfeld himself, the man who started out working on carnival midways and for the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, would end up producing the musical theatre’s most revered work!
Show Boat advanced in broad strokes a movement already in motion towards the musical play whose songs were an integral part of the action. In the calm estimation of Ethan Mordden, The Desert Song, presented the previous season, with a book by Frank Mandel, Oscar Hammerstein and Otto Harbach, was “all of a piece, as neatly composed as a pane of glass, a libretto that extends so fully into the action that most of the numbers are a mixture of underscored dialogue and song.”8 At least as far back as Very Good Eddie, songs were written to help advance the story. Hammerstein would one day reflect, “There are a few things in life of which I am certain, but I’m sure of this one thing, that the song is the servant of the play, that it is wrong to write first what you think is an attractive song and then try to wedge it into the story.”9 In fact, integration of song and story was then, as it still is now, more a concept denoting depth of character and story development, a guideline.
And what was the show’s impact on this emerging movement in musical theatre? It caused a tremor through show circles—but not an earthquake. Two years following Show Boat’s historic premiere, the stock market took its catastrophic tumble, and the prolonged depression that ensued did not favor a string of Show Boats. Box office records reveal that during the 1930s, people who could afford pricey theatre tickets generally did not enjoy stories of social injustice; rather, they preferred patronizing light satirical revues and trite book shows. In 1930, thirty-four new musicals opened on Broadway, only five fewer than the year before. The entertainers ruled. Little wonder why the Gershwin boys and DuBose Heyward flopped out in 1935 with their monumental work of life along catfish row in Charleston, South Carolina, the oh-so-serious Porgy and Bess, which lasted a paltry 124 performances. Gershwin’s exalted musicalization of Heyward’s novel—more soaring but less universal than Show Boat—would eventually be awarded due acclaim. Its book, all sung-through on opening night, would benefit by future revisions, in particular by the replacement of excessive recitative with dialogue. Porgy, however, would forever be relegated in the popular imagination to a narrow if mesmerizing view of black ghetto life, whereas Show Boat encompassed in its sweeping, time-traversing vision practically the whole of the American experience. Porgy sulked and sizzled in an urban ghetto. Show Boat sailed the broad waters of America.
Porgy marked the end of the line for the Gershwin brothers, who had enjoyed an enviable record of six sparkling hits over a mere seven-year period—Lady Be Good, Oh, Kay!, Funny Face, Strike Up the Band, Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing. Girl Crazy unleashed onto the legit stage the high-voltage Ethel Merman, blowing forth a gust of new classics—“I Got Rhythm,” “Biding My Time,” “But Not for Me,” “Embraceable You.” Of Thee I Sing, by today’s sensibilities a tad more silly than significant, garnered the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Not for George. Not for Ira. For librettists George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Yet more remembered than the award-winning libretto, about a fickle presidential candidate reneging on a campaign promise to wed a Miss America contest winner, are the songs—among them “Love Is Sweeping the Country,” “Who Cares?” “Wintergreen for President” and “Of Thee I Sing.”
One composer ill-suited to please Depression-era audiences was German-born Kurt Weill, whose austere upbringing was irreversibly shaped by his association with fellow traveler, playwright Bertolt Brecht, of the self-anointed didactic school of drama. In essence, Brecht insisted on minimizing as much as possible the emotional impact of theatre. He wanted to reach the minds rather than the hearts of the audience. He and Weill struck out on America soil with their first offering, the grizzly across-the-tracks Threepenny Opera, which lasted all of 12 performances at the Empire Theatre. Full of cynicism and despair, its hard-edged songs were cold and downbeat, its low-life scenes of usury and betrayal among whores and outlaws on the parasitic edges of society an affront to Depression-era audiences. Years later, led by the enthusiasm of Marc Blitzstein, and then with Leonard Bernstein lending his support, in 1954 Threepenny played a limited ten-week engagement off–Broadway. It earned such a firestorm of approval from theatergoers and critics like Brook Atkinson that it was brought back. Six years later, Threepenny finally closed out a phenomenal return, and “Mack the Knife” was now Kurt Weill’s most popular song. Thereafter, it would prove a difficult sell. It did not so much follow Show Boat as circumvent it.
Socially conscious writers, in fact, all tended to circumvent musical theatre traditions out of disdain for commercialism, even though they signed contracts and presumably hoped to earn royalties. Marc Blitzstein, of the Weill and Brecht school, was an innovator too daring for his own good. He came in, late thirties, with a blistering diatribe against corporate greed and worker exploitation called The Cradle Will Rock. It won him instant admiration from the literati—hardly the force of a box office stampede. Blitzstein’s one-sided polemic, commissioned by the WPA and presented after venue cancellations in a bare recital format, earned early notoriety, all from the fragile legacy of a 14-performance run. When revived in 1947, Cradle, described by Stanley Green as “little more than an animated left wing political cartoon,” again failed to attract an audience.10 Restagings in 1964 and 1983 proved similarly futile.
Lotte Lenya plays Jenny the street walker and Scott Merrill is Mack-the-Knife in The Threepenny Opera.
The Blitzstein libretto may have been the very first in musical theatre not to revolve around a standard romance. The stark, experimentally unsentimental score to this day impresses. The composer’s hyperactive “Let’s Do Something!”—a shrieking send-up to the madness of inflated consumer-driven activity for activity’s sake—opened the orchestra pit to a dissonance that would brilliantly influence a very young Leonard Bernstein. West Side Story, then still years away, owes something to Cradle.
Through the 1930s, a decade when 175 new musicals opened on Broadway, the songwriters who profited nicely were the ones who avoided taking themselves too seriously. Newcomer Harold Rome fared famously well with his long-running union-sympathetic revue, Pins and Needles, which depicted the organizing efforts of a likable group of garment workers—played by real-life garment workers—while Rome poked good-natured fun at two-faced politicians, foreign dictators (always a safe target) and some not-so-pretty croon-spoon aspects of American life. Pop king Irving Berlin found a middle ground for his songs in topical revues and book musicals produced by Sam H. Harris. His 1932 offering Face the Music, with a book by Moss Hart and direction by Hassard Short and George Kaufman, satirized a host of quirky New York socialites down on their luck singing “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” and the show stayed around for a respectable 162 performances.
When Berlin returned the following season, with the same collaborators minus Kaufman, he mined real box office gold in As Thousands Cheer. Cheer, they did. The show was scenically structured in the form of a newspaper, with succeeding headlines spelling out the issues underpinning songs and skits, a few of which rose above the predictably light weight. Among these was the chilling “Unknown Negro Lynched by Frenzied Mob,” a number deemed by Variety “completely out of line with the spirit of the show,”11 to which Ethel Waters, making her first appearance in a “white” Broadway show, responded with a triumphant rendition of Berlin’s tragically affecting “Suppertime.” Out of this big walloping hit came “Heat Wave,” “Harlem On My Mind” and the immortal “Easter Parade.” And it marked Marilyn Miller’s twelfth and final Broadway show.
During most of the 1930s the revue remained gloriously in vogue. Bandwagon, a 1931 hit at the New Amsterdam starring Fred and Adele Astaire (in their last Broadway appearance), is considered by many to be the finest revue of all time. It had songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz—“New Sun in the Sky,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “I Love Louise”—sketches by Dietz and Kaufman, and direction by Hassard Short, whose deft staging work Variety, evidently not hearing the score others heard and not finding the humor much more than “crude,” termed “the biggest thing connected with this pleasant evening.”12
Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, appearing in her last edition (’36), with Bob Hope in the skit “Baby Snooks Goes to Hollywood.”
Schwartz and Dietz were back in 1935 with the less successful At Home Abroad. Vincent Minnelli directed a star-laden cast of present and future celebrities including Beatrice Lillie, Ethel Waters, Eddie Foy, Jr., Vera Allen and Eleanor Powell. The revue toured a world of locales, and its songs offered plenty to praise: “Get Yourself a Geisha” and “That’s Not Cricket,” the latter coming with an equally top-notch tune, were two hilarious highlights. “Got a Brand New Suit” whirled itself into a rhythmic Gershwinesque fever, while “What a Wonderful World” simply cheered the heart. Schwartz and Dietz had actually profited the most working on earlier revues: The Little Show at the Music Box in 1929, featuring Clifton Webb, Fred Allen and Libby Holman, and Three’s a Crowd at the Selwyn Theatre in 1930, with the same headliners, and for which Burton Lane and Vernon Duke contributed additional songs. By the end of the Depression, the revue format was fading fast.
How infinitely easier it was to compose a batch of good songs than to devise a libretto in which they could be logically fitted. The looser revue structure helped some marvelous songwriters excel outside the maddening constraints of the new book show. Cole Porter tried to make it with credible librettists. Mostly they succeeded with him, and he despite them. Porter’s unrivaled capacity for sophistication naturally favored paper-thin librettos wrapped around the giddy, gilded environs of New York society night life. “Love for Sale” may stand as Porter’s signature piece. First introduced in The New Yorkers in 1930, it was ordered off the airwaves for a time by radio executives. In night clubs and dance halls, though, the number soon enjoyed wide appeal and became an almost instant standard.
In a sense, most of the transient love about which Porter so sensually composed was likely informed by his own active though closeted homosexuality.13 Even those who end up together in a Cole Porter musical seem bound to break apart—the lure of another illicit party up the street being too strong to resist. Interviewed by American magazine in 1935, Porter quipped, “I’m a hard working boy from Indiana, and I’m engaged in the business of entertaining myself, which enables me to entertain, as much as I can, the world.”14
Anything Goes, Porter’s finest work, is so rich in sky-crashing choruses (“Blow, Gabriel, Blow!”), in witty love anthems (“I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top”), in lovely emotion (“All Through the Night”), that it stands almost alone in its triumphal completion. Variety termed it “a festival of lyrics, an engrossing exhibition of poetic sleight of hand that looks very well indeed, but listens even better … a funny book, smart dialogue, and a production that’s worthy of all these things…. Miss Merman is 100% right … a delicious poke at the gangster theme.”15 In Cole Porter, the American musical had found its most gifted one-person collaboration—that rare soul who creates both words and music.
Porter’s 1939 offering, DuBarry Was a Lady, nearly matched the 400-plus performance run of Anything Goes. Panama Hattie, which opened at the 46th Street Theatre in 1940, topped it by 80 shows, and a Danny Kaye vehicle in 1941, Let’s Face It, did even better. In between, there were the lackluster Jubilee and Red, Hot & Blue, followed by a solid hit, Leave It to Me, in which Mary Martin, making her Broadway debut, sang another Porter classic, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
And what of Richard Rodgers? In 1925, shortly following his contemplated career change to underwear salesman, he and Mr. Hart caught the elusive Broadway express at last. They did it by writing Dearest Enemy, followed by The Girl Friend, Peggy Ann, and A Connecticut Yankee. Then came a reason, or nine reasons, to reconsider the retail apparel market—nine flops in a row. And stints out in Tinseltown working on mostly forgettable movies after delivering up, in 1932, one flat-out classic, Love Me Tonight, which starred Jeannette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier and gave the world “Isn’t It Romantic” and “Mimi.”
Then came 1935 and a Rodgers and Hart rebirth in the perilous form of Jumbo, a huge spectacular at the moribund Hippodrome that had been dark for five years, now rebuilt to resemble a circus arena. Produced by Billy Rose and directed by George Abbott and John Murray Anderson (who would one day direct the actual Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus), Jumbo spent more time in rehearsal—six months—than it did entertaining the public. It was so costly to operate that Rose shut it down after 233 showings. Still, Jumbo had the look and certainly the sound of a winner, and Rodgers and Hart were back in favor. For a spell, the invincible giants walked on water, as On Your Toes followed in 1936; Babes in Arms and I’d Rather Be Right in 1937; I Married an Angel and The Boys from Syracuse in 1938. Too Many Girls, which opened in 1939 with Eddie Bracken, Van Johnson and Desi Arnaz in its cast, surprised with a Latin-flavored score rather atypical, though not unexpected, for Rodgers and Hart.
They wrote to the popular tastes of the day, and they wrote so many songs so easily (and to such wildly vacillating standards), and were so adaptable to composing their way through constant script changes, that Rodgers once estimated their total output to be over one thousand songs, a few hundred of which, he surmised, had been discarded and lost forever.16
Rodgers and Hart delivered romantic books filled with agreeable everyday-type characters, and they preferred fast-paced productions, as did George Abbott, who sometimes co-wrote the book with Rodgers and Hart or Kaufman, other times stuck to the direction alone. Most of the shows remain barely revivable. Of the lot, Jumbo’s score is the most hit-laden. On Your Toes utilized ballet for the first time to help tell the story, and Shakespeare got his start in singing and dancing shows, thanks to The Boys from Syracuse, a Rodgers and Hart musical, with a book by George Abbott, based on the bard’s A Comedy of Errors. Pal Joey broke major new ground in musical theatre realism.
In that most prolific and magical period between 1936 and 1939, each of their six hits in a row easily topped 200 performances. Only four other new musicals (among them, Hellzapoppin! and The Show Is On) also exceeded the 200 mark during that time. The secret to their success? “Don’t have a formula, and don’t repeat it,” they are said to have once remarked.17
The personal story behind Rodgers and Hart is more dramatic than anything they ever brought to the stage. Poor Larry, short of stature and with a head too large for his frame, all along suffered his own bitter loneliness, consecutively rejected in his romantic longings by women—or men, or even Richard Rodgers—depending on whose account you may wish to believe. He drove himself farther away from the people who should have mattered the most to him, drinking himself through lonely nights, cruising up bars and back alleys. Near the end, Rodgers would have to go out on rescue missions, tracking and pinning down his erratic drunken collaborator. Some of the lyrics were completed, if not entirely written, by Rodgers himself. Larry Hart “was about as varied a personality as you can possibly imagine,” said Rodgers. “He was difficult in many ways, but never meant to be difficult. He was a sweet man. He was a very good man. He was a very kind man.”18
Hart’s attitude towards his craft grew ever more flippant. At work on I Married an Angel, he flabbergasted director Josh Logan by coming up with the irrelevant comedy show-stopper “At the Roxy Music Hall.” Logan confronted Hart head on, protesting that the number would not fit the story’s Budapest setting.
Explained Larry, “Oh, we’ll just bring up the subject of New York and she’ll start singing it.”
“It has nothing to do with anything,” argued Logan.
Shot back the cocky, confident Hart: “We’ve got to do something different, that’s all, and give people a little fun. They’ll forgive anything that’s good!”19
Relevance to the libretto notwithstanding, is there a love song more perfectly realized, more truthful than Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine”? Anything funnier than their “To Keep My Love Alive”? The crippled team managed to produce some of their finest material towards the end of their prolific partnership, delivering, in 1940, one of the century’s greatest musicals, Pal Joey. In a sense, Larry had finally found a property very close to his own non-romantic existence in bars and other sundry dives. “He had spent thousands of hours in exactly the kind of atmosphere depicted in the stories,” wrote Rodgers in his book Musical Stage, “and was thoroughly familiar with the pal Joeys of this world.”20 Based on a series of short stories in the New Yorker by John O’Hara, Pal Joey tells the tale of a would-be club owner, Vera Simpson, who falls for a self-professed gigolo and pays for his companionship until it bores her. Hart never wrote more insightful lyrics.
By that time, Oscar Hammerstein—remember him?—was a flop-ridden loser. After Show Boat, he had worked with Otto Harbach and Henry Myers on the book for the fairly successful Good Boy, which had music by Harry Ruby, Herbert Stothart, and Arthur Schwartz, lyrics by Bert Kalmar. The show’s claim to fame was “I Wanna Be Loved By You,” sung by Helen Kane, quickly dubbed the “Boop-Boop-A-Doop” girl. Three more money-making ventures followed: Hammerstein contributed the lyrics and co-wrote the book for Sigmund Romberg’s The New Moon, which contained a very fine score (“Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise”). And with Jerome Kern he did both book and lyrics for Sweet Adeline in 1929, and, three years later, for Music in the Air, from which the world first heard “I’ve Told Every Little Star” and the rhapsodic “The Song Is You.”
Throughout the rest of the thirties, Hammerstein stumbled through a humiliating series of box office blunders. Included among these was another worthy effort with Kern, the marginally pleasing Very Warm for May, which delivered a number deemed by jazz musicians and cabaret singers to be about the best song ever composed: “All The Things You Are.” Hammerstein and Kern’s most ambitious post–Show Boat effort was a Civil War musical, in collaboration with Otto Harbach on book and lyrics, Gentlemen Unafraid. It died after six tryout performances in St. Louis in 1938.
The once invincible duo could only lick their wounds while a rather thematically inconsequential spectacle of crowd-pandering vulgarity, Hellzapoppin!, starring the musical theatre’s new reigning champs, Olsen & Johnson, racked up box office records in the late 1930s without any help from the critics. Its belligerently non-integrated score featured such soul-searching ditties as “Fuddle De Duddle” and “Boomps-A-Daisy.”
From their newly humbled perspective, the former giants could watch George M. Cohan, now a living legend, return to the stage for the first time in ten years, cast reluctantly as Franklin Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right, the first show in which he appeared that he did not also write. Or they could marvel—or shake their heads in disbelief—over the sight of an anti-hero holding center stage in Pal Joey. Watching the success of others with more commercial properties or sexier productions while struggling to regain their own mastery, they sank deeper into the abyss of has-beens. Collaborating with Arthur Schwartz who composed the music, Oscar wrote the book and penned the words for American Jubilee, a patriotic pageant with a cast of 350 at the New York World’s Fair of 1940. Following the dismal fold of Very Warm for May, Kern did not compose another score. Six years later, while in New York City attending auditions for a 1945 revival of Show Boat, Jerome Kern suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, fell to the street without any i.d. on his person, was driven to a derelict’s facility on Welfare Island, and died alone among destitute strangers.
Oscar’s World’s Fair assignment gave us four anonymous numbers—“How Can I Ever Be Alone?”, “My Bicycle Girl,” “We Like It Over There” and “Tennessee Fish Fry.” Washed up, out of touch, old-fashioned and clearly over the hill—so cried members of the cynical New Haven crowd. Three years later, however, he got back on his feet once again and sent the musical spinning off into uncharted territory. He would yet conquer the eternal infant with a mastery of libretto and lyric writing that to this day remains unsurpassed and with a showmanship that astonished possibly even himself. And this time, the whole world would follow.