His one abiding love being musical theatre, Richard Rodgers was not known for sustaining close friendships. When asked during an extended Canadian radio interview with Tony Thomas shortly after the opening of The Sound of Music if he was not “impervious to the feeling” that success gave him, he answered without a single nod to the social pleasures: “Never, Never. There are certain elemental things that are always gratifying—eating, a warm bath, making love, and having a successful show.”1 As fondly recalled by his daughter, Mary, “He loved staying up till two in the morning trying to figure out what to do with a show. He loved going to see his shows over and over, standing anonymously at the back of the theatre. He bought the whole package.”2
Rodgers spoke of Oscar Hammerstein as “a dear friend,”3 and just as warmly about Lorenz Hart. “Each, during our association, was the closest friend I had.”4 Yet about fifteen years following Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers confessed, “I was very fond of him—very fond of him—and I never did find out whether he liked me or not. To this day I don’t know.”5 Oscar was equally insecure about where he stood with Dick, once spilling out his insecurities to protege Stephen Sondheim: “What do you think of Dick? Because I don’t know him at all. We’ve worked together all these years and I don’t really know him…. Dick’s life is the office or the box office of the theatre…. I just don’t understand.”6
There were few individuals willing to express any affection for Rodgers. He reportedly disliked a number of people himself. Away from the media, he showed a tactless side, once lambasting the late Gertrude Lawrence, who introduced Anna in The King and I, for her off-key singing. And those who served him well were not always accorded reciprocal respect. So obsessed did he become with his success and reputation, that during an extended bout of depression and drinking in the late 1950s, Rodgers voluntarily submitted himself to the Payne Whitney Clinic after auditions for Flower Drum Song were complete. He stayed under psychiatric surveillance for 12 weeks. From all reports, he fretted over his status with each passing show, as if he lived in perpetual fear of losing his talent.
Insecurities are not confined to underachievers. Only three days after the smash opening of South Pacific, Rodgers found himself socially in the company of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya at Hammerstein’s Upper East Side home, where he was driven to a near panic, up on his feet and pacing while Weill played for the guests a sampling of the music from his new show in the works, Lost in the Stars. America’s most successful show composer struck Weill as suffering “a terrible case of inferiority complex which he tries desperately to hide behind arrogance…. I almost began feeling sorry for him.”7 Unable evidently to endure the compositions of a perceived rival—and hardly a rival of note in the commercial sphere—it is easy to trust Mr. Rodgers telling his interviewer, Tony Thomas, that for him, happiness was having a new show to work on.
Having narrowly escaped the alternative fate of infant’s underwear salesman during the bleak break-in years with Larry Hart, Rodgers then spent the rest of his life acting as if at any moment that fate could still befall him—as if the precarious world to which he clung show by show might suddenly come crashing down. He had no doubt witnessed the early demise of other show composers. His professional focus was fiercely possessive. No time for friendships.
No time for friendly talk about politics or world affairs, or anything outside the next show at hand when he and Oscar Hammerstein got together for weekly brainstorming sessions. Insiders have surmised that the two partners, by silent mutual understanding, steered tactfully clear of personal disagreements that might infringe on their collaboration. Who was more aloof? One thing was certain: Richard Rodgers seized the reins of corporate control. He struck many as being cold-hearted in his impersonalized manner of overseeing the operation of Rodgers & Hammerstein. In reply to Tony Thomas’s question, “You’re a businessman?” the belligerent tone of Rodgers’ answer sounds laughably disingenuous. “No,” he flatly replied, “I’m not a businessman in any sense. I’m a very bad businessman and I don’t do any business. I have people who do it for me. I don’t hire anybody. I don’t let anybody go. I don’t talk money with anybody…. At this moment, I can’t tell you the salary of anybody who works for me.”8
Tales of Dick’s chilly behavior as de facto head of the R&H empire are legion. When Joshua Logan came to Hammerstein’s rescue during work on the script for South Pacific, volunteering to supply dialogue about military life that Oscar was unable to write, Logan rightfully felt that he should receive credit as co-librettist. Hammerstein agreed, telling him, “I’m sorry I didn’t offer it to you myself. Of course you can have it. We’ll work out the exact details later.”9 The case that Hammerstein tried making for Logan’s input did not succeed at first with Rodgers, who is unkindly remembered for having tersely opposed the idea. He eventually relented, four days before rehearsals commenced. It left Logan so embittered that when Rodgers and Hammerstein offered him participation on The King and I, including full co-authorship, he declined.
Dick Rodgers was first and foremost a composer, and composers need a kind of existential flexibility to survive. After all, it is they who must accept the words given them by their collaborators, they who must agree to go along with the images and messages conveyed by others. Rodgers certainly navigated his way through marked changes not only in the content and style of his own profession, but in the ever-evolving landscape of American society. He was bound to have scored shows whose thematic grist did not jibe with his own personal beliefs or assorted grudges. He had faithfully stuck it out for twenty-five years with Larry Hart, dutifully compensating for his partner’s unreliable, sometimes infuriating ways. In that collaboration, Rodgers played the role of devoted long-suffering spouse with admirable fidelity. In fact, he stuck with Larry Hart long after most teams would have split. Loyalty or desperation? Considering the precarious, short-lived nature of such affiliations and the ability of Rodgers to attract any number of other lyric writers, he displayed remarkable loyalty. After joining forces with Hammerstein, Rodgers told director George Abbott, “I never want to have another collaborator as long as I live.”10
If on the surface Rodgers revealed scarce compassion, yet what a flood of wonderful music came rolling forth from the man’s soul. The sheer speed of his composing talent boggles the mind. Tunes were born in five, ten, easily fifteen or twenty minutes. No wonder Mr. Rodgers hung out so often at the office—even if he didn’t know how much money anybody in his employ was making. He came close on one occasion to bearing a degree of guilt over his effortless creativity. “It’s been said about you,” asked Tony Thomas, “that you can write melodies as easily as if it were in the same league as eating, drinking and breathing. Now, is it really that easy for you?”
Answered Rodgers, “You could say that it was as easy as eating, for instance, if you started with the beginning of eating, which would be raising the cattle which provide the meat, or growing the vegetables or the fruit, and then the actual process of eating is quite simple, provided you have some teeth, which I’m happy to tell you I have. The easy approach is to say, ‘Oh, look, Oscar handed him a lyric…and out came the tune in five minutes.’ Well, the tune didn’t come out in five minutes. We had gone through months of discussion about the play. We knew a great deal about the situation in which the particular song occurred. We had reached a mutual decision as to the time signature, so that it would fit in with the song before and the song after. All these things condition the actual composing. And you carry it around with you subconsciously, and consciously very often, for a great length of time, and finally you reach the moment of composition. And it comes in a rush.”11
He was not the first or only tunesmith to deliver the goods in a rush. And with Hammerstein supplying the words first, Rodgers found the job even easier. “Having the lyric in addition to the situation in the play is very helpful to me,” he said. “It gives me an extra push into the solution to the problem of finding the tune.” He spoke glowingly of his partner’s craft: “Oscar is one of the few writers in the entire world who has a tremendous sense of construction. And, without a tune, his lyrics are beautifully built.”12
In private, all that “construction” was still far too time-consuming for the restless Richard Rodgers, who could never quite fathom why it took Oscar so long just to come up with a few new verses. And comparisons to his previous partner—the one who scribbled out finished couplets as fast as a pencil could form them on paper against the edge of a piano—were bound to provoke impatience and suspicion. Rodgers confided, years later, to Alan Jay Lerner before blowing off their fruitless attempt at collaborating on On a Clear Day You Can See Forever: “He would go down there to his farm in Bucks County and sometimes it would be three weeks before he appeared with a lyric. I never knew what he was doing down there. You know a lyric couldn’t possibly take three weeks.”13
Lerner knew it could. Another perfectionist, he slugged through ninety versions of the title lyric for Clear Day before he had what he wanted. What Oscar did do down there on the farm was to agonize over every single word. After laboring for five wrenching weeks on “Hello, Young Lovers,” which finally crystallized in the last 48 hours, Oscar proudly sent over the finished lyric to Dick via courier. Then he anxiously awaited a phone call from Dick acknowledging receipt and maybe offering some praise. The expected call never came. Oscar, feeling painfully slighted, kept it to himself. A week or so later when the two were conversing about something else, Dick casually mentioned “Hello, Young Lovers” in passing, indicating only that it fit the melody he had composed for it.
Before his unparalleled successes with Hammerstein, Rodgers had presided over some notable innovations, as heretofore noted, principally the knuckle-bare realism of Pal Joey. He did not shy away from controversial subjects, so he was prepared to hold his own with Hammerstein or anyone else. The partners courted popular tastes, careful to infuse each new show with songs that could serve both theatre and radio markets. For instance, South Pacific generated a trio of Hit Parade favorites, with Perry Como’s “Some Enchanted Evening” commanding the number one position on the charts for many weeks, “Bali Ha’i” reaching the number 5 slot, and “A Wonderful Guy” number 12.
To the 1948 movie State Fair, for which Oscar wrote the screenplay, they contributed six top-notch numbers, including another big hit—the sublimely wistful “It Might As Well Be Spring”; a rousing waltz, “It’s a Grand Night for Singing”; and two uptempo, atypical R&H numbers that bounced to the prevailing beat of the day, “That’s for Me” and “Isn’t It Kind of Fun.”
In the late 1940s, the unique Rodgers and Hammerstein magic seemed perfectly in step with the positive postwar mood of America. A little jewel dropped from Oklahoma! and subsequently recorded as a single by Judy Garland, “Boys and Girls,” evoked a small-town innocence that enveloped the nation. “My Girl Back Home,” a number deleted from South Pacific (and later used in the movie version), was sung by Lt. Cable, a Philadelphia native serving duty in the South Seas, reminiscing over the distant dreams of a simpler time and place.
It would have been politically easier to remove from South Pacific another song, quite daring for its day, which dealt with racial intolerance. The dissenters warned that the lyric might offend audiences and endanger the show’s commercial prospects. Hammerstein took his concerns to James Michener, author of the novel from which South Pacific was adapted. Michener is well known for having replied that if they dropped the number they would be pulling out the show’s thematic foundation. To their everlasting credit, Dick and Oscar held firm against pressure from trusted friends and associates during out-of-town tryouts in New Haven, and Cable sang, all the way to opening night and beyond in New York City, an eloquent protest against culturally conditioned bigotry, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”
The musical was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, along with countless other awards, including multiple Tonys. “I wept,” confessed Kenneth Tynan in his New Yorker notice. “And there is nothing in criticism harder to convey one’s gratitude for that…. This is the first musical romance I have ever seen which has seriously involved an adult subject.”14
Into the 1950s, the theatre’s reigning musical giants had one more major coup up their sleeves. It was The King and I, adapted from Margaret Landon’s novel Anna and the King of Siam with superior skill by Hammerstein, who would receive just acclaim. “A libretto that stands on its own merits,” sang Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. “The most important part,” agreed John Chapman, “is the work of Mr. Hammerstein as librettist and lyricist. It is an intricate and expert piece of showmanship in which the story comes first.”15 The King and I is surely one of the two or three best integrated musicals ever mounted on a New York stage. And its music courts an Eastern air with haunting relevance. Mr. Rodgers’s soaring refrains sent such tautly expressive lyrics as “My Lord and Master” and “I Have Dreamed” into melodic ecstasy. His stirring “March of the Siamese Children” is quite possibly the finest piece of theatre music he ever wrote. Jerome Robbins directed the entire affair into brilliant completion.
The universality of Hammerstein’s compassion was never better expressed than in the hopeful “We Kiss in a Shadow.” Here was a lyric that would come to stand for the lonely aspirations of so many ostracized lovers longing for ultimate acceptance from an intolerant society. Hammerstein pursued his clear line of reasoning to its triumphant conclusion—when, at last, the couple no longer have to hide from the world but can express their love in the sunlight.
The King and I builds its conflict steadily to a harrowing climax. The king discovers his concubine Tuptim trying to escape to run off with her lover, Lun Tha, and prepares to punish her with a whip lashing. He suffers humiliation at the hands of Anna, who argues him away from such brutality. The next scene finds the demoralized king on his death bed, turning over the reins of power to his son, whose youthful ideas for progress and change he heroically encourages, and who, as a result, begins right there setting into motion a more humane way of life for his subjects. The musical’s resolution, a rarity in musical theatre, comprises a terrific drama all in itself. Few shows are so tautly developed from start to finish.
South Pacific original co-stars Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza.
On their own, away from established source material, R&H fell short of the magic. Original ventures were not their forte, although the flawed Allegro, the show that came between Carousel and South Pacific, showed promise in its enthralling first act. But after intermission, Hammerstein railed tritely against the pursuit of material success at the expense of losing one’s soul and connection to community. In one of his cleverest pieces, “Money Isn’t Everything,” he chided upper class consumerism.
Allegro was originally intended to depict the entire life of Joseph Taylor, Jr., who grows up to be a prosperous doctor in a large city. Alas, the librettist didn’t quite make it to the end; the final curtain was lowered instead on Taylor’s returning home to the small town where he was raised, amidst an outpouring of touchy-feely love from folks all designed to appear more noble than heartless city dwellers. Hammerstein scarcely grappled with the more perplexing issues inherent in his play, such as the value and practice of medicine in a large city as opposed to a small town. He did not confront this central theme in any of the songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein beat around the bush, only alluding to greed and immorality in a big city by showing how disillusioned it made their hero, and then by struggling to make his hometown, in comparison, seem less shallow and therefore more worthy of a doctor’s true devotion. It is a tuner told in black and white. Some critics looked past the melodrama to impressive innovations. “The season’s most unusual attraction,” noted Jack Pulaski of Variety, “… creates a virtually new theatre form.”16 The other half were left totally irritated. “A shocking disappointment,” wrote Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker. “An elaborate sermon,” complained John Chapman.17
Whistling a happy tune on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1951: Richard Rodgers (at the piano), Oscar Hammerstein and Gertrude Lawrence, star of The King and I.
And yet the first act is vigorously full of Joseph’s infancy, adolescence and young adulthood, and it brims with sentimental realism. The music sets it all gloriously a-sail. It is the skeletal second act that falters, standing there in a shell like a kind of construction zone full of interesting parts yet to be fully assembled and merged. A pair of fine songs, “Money Isn’t Everything” and “The Gentleman Is a Dope,” whose minor strains foreshadowed a developing musical language of Rodgers’s that would blossom in South Pacific, keep the diminished proceedings alive.
Allegro’s first act blossomed in full when the Glendale, California, Civic Light Opera mounted the show in 1983, with a full orchestra. The savvy assessment of Brooks Atkinson thirty-five years earlier applied just as persuasively to the new performance as it had then: “Before the mood breaks after the first act it is full of a kind of unexpected glory…. Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein have just missed the final splendor of a perfect work of art.”18 Looking back many years later over his vast body of work, Mr. Rodgers called this show the one “most worthy of a second chance.”19
Allegro is thought of by many to be an early “concept” musical. Some claim it to be the first. By presenting its themes through a Greek chorus which served as the author’s alter ego, it moved away from the primal force of character-driven revelation into the more cerebral artifact of lecture. This intellectual format would come into dubious vogue twenty-five years later. However, if it worked for the first act of Allegro, why not the second act too? Because by the time Hammerstein got there, he relied too much upon his Greek chorus for ballast, failing to flesh out dramatically Joseph’s actual involvement with his patients and with the boards of directors to whom he reported with increasing skepticism. The show collapses into a saccharine one-note “Come Home, Joe!” resolution, intended to convey the evil of the Big City compared to the virtue of Small Town life. Rather than feeling inspired over Joe’s answering the call to return to his birthplace and take up with real people again, we are bludgeoned by a ponderously self-righteous pitch, “Come Home, Joe,” for everything pure and constant that awaits him there, for honest friends and men with strong hands and hearts.
They left us in limbo. After South Pacific and The King and I, Rodgers and Hammerstein concocted a sprawling, at times turgid, valentine to the theatre, Me and Juliet—if we are to believe everything we have heard and read about this failed, forgotten work. No wonder it was the only R&H show on which George Abbott would ever work; he tried to direct some life into the contrivance, and he succeeded to a degree, for amazingly it managed to turn a tidy profit on its one-year residency at the Majestic Theatre.
It is not so difficult to understand why the show did as well as it did, for the libretto is more dramatically interesting (at least to read) than the dreary impression of it left by many downbeat accounts. Briefly, Hammerstein’s linear story is driven by Joe, a variation on the clumsy Jud Fry character with membership in the stage electrician’s union. Joe turns into the Phantom of the Me and Juliet company when he threatens to beat up if not murder any man who dares go near his girlfriend, Jeanie, about whom he refuses to get serious but to whom he claims exclusive rights. When Jeanie shows some romantic interest in the director, Larry, the pressure builds, and in one of the most eerie and threatening first act closers ever, Joe discovers Jeanie and Larry in a kiss during a rehearsal from the bridge of the stage where he is working, and angrily redirects a spotlight onto them. But the “Phantom” threat is not carried through in the slumping second act. Joe comes to accept Jeanie’s intention to marry Larry, and he redeems his violent nature in a mushy-eyed turnaround.
The electrician’s anger did not evidently make for a very engaging evening. Of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, this one received by far the worst set of reviews. “We kept saying over and over to ourselves,” wrote Robert Coleman, “‘Dick Rodgers and Oc Hammerstein didn’t do it. They couldn’t have done it. They’d have taken this one off in Boston for revamping.’” There was only one favorable rating in the bunch. Book problems vexed their every move, made even worse by the heavy-handedness of Hammerstein’s more earnest moments in verse. In the estimation of Brooks Atkinson, Me and Juliet added down to “a book that has no velocity … looks a little like a rehearsal.”20
Dick and Oscar did manage to create five quite excellent numbers, some in the older Rodgers and Hart vein. To a haunting tango which Rodgers had composed the previous year for his acclaimed 26-part television series, Victory at Sea, Hammerstein added words and it became the instant popular hit, “No Other Love,” recorded by Perry Como, who also scored additional airplay with his zippy rendition of the clever “Keep It Gay.” Joe Stafford turned “I’m Your Girl” into a moody LP standard. The tongue-in-cheek “Marriage Type Love” bounced with a 1930s charm, while “We Deserve Each Other” revealed with painterly precision two quirky offbeat characters (not from Allegro land) who find much in common, including non-intellectual bents.
A handful of bright stellar songs could not redeem all the unwelcome dialogue and blurry plot lines—and this after gigantically talented George Abbott was given permission by the boys to cut the script to smithereens for clarity and pacing. Plodding it remained. Plodding surely describes “The Big Black Giant,” an epic embarrassment of which Oscar was delusionally proud, about the changing faces of the audience as seen by the cast.
That was 1953. What the two foundering partners did with their follow up attempt to recapture the old magic was theoretically good. On paper, the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel Sweet Thursday, about a sub-community of good-natured across-the-tracks characters on Monterey’s Cannery Row, presented a colorful locale and different view of life. The story, however, hardly contained a major dramatic conflict save for the fuzzy plight of Suzy, a homeless drifter (“Everybody’s Got a Home But Me”) who takes up work at a house of ill repute, Bear Flag Cafe, operated by Fauna, a role not much enlivened by opera star Helen Traubel, and Doc, a self-made marine biologist. Pipe Dream caused some wonderful music to be written, and Hammerstein responded to the subject matter with sensitive originality. From “It Takes All Kind of People,” Doc draws deft comparisons to the animal kingdom, where various creatures, not so attractive to the eyes of humans, can be quite desirable to each other. Another oddball delight is “Tide Pool,” set to turbulent music, which surveys the survivalist games below water.
Several of Pipe Dream’s songs landed in hit parade territory long enough to validate the still-populist instincts of Dick and Oscar. The plaintive “Everybody’s Got a Home But Me” was recorded by Eddie Fisher. Carmen McRae’s brisk rendition of the contemporary “The Next Time It Happens” flirted in the upper reaches of the top 100, while Perry Como’s soft crooning of the slow beguine, “All At Once You Love Her,” took it to the number 24 position on the charts.
Beyond a fairly fascinating score which has never received due credit, Pipe Dream (ironically billed “a musical comedy”) lost its potential punch in a sugar-coated vagueness not so different from Allegro’s. The main problem was Suzy’s identity. Skittish about prostitution, Hammerstein failed to confront the heroine’s red-light district involvement at the Bear Flag and make it dramatically engrossing. Tiptoeing around the issue, his subtly humorous “The Happiest House on the Block” alluded to the world’s oldest profession as practiced on Cannery Row with safe innuendos.
Worse still, it was not even clear if Suzy actually serviced a single client under Fauna’s aegis. Outside that happy little house, Suzy falls in love with Doc, and they meander passively-aggressively through a standoffish flirtation, goaded on primarily by local denizens who feel the two belong together. Pipe Dream contained the seeds of a dramatic tour-de-force, if only its creators could have faced the darker music—as Rodgers with Hart did in Pal Joey. During rehearsals the initial force of the piece was watered down. Suzy, the intended prostitute, came off looking, in John Steinbeck’s opinion, more “like an off-duty visiting nurse.”21 The author sent notes of concern, then of mild protest to O.H, in one of them addressing Suzy’s position in the Bear Flag: “It’s either a whore house, or it isn’t. Suzy either took a job there, or she didn’t…. My position is that she took the job all right but wasn’t any good at it.”22 The question was never decisively answered in dialogue or action, so Hammerstein’s quirky comedic touches, of which this show had many, and Rodgers’s adventurous free-flowing music were destined to carry Pipe Dream. The authors could only allude to a philosophical tolerance for life’s unconventional free souls. They could only think the best of their misguided heroine, acknowledging, in “Suzy Is a Good Thing,” that like everybody else Suzie was bound to make mistakes now and then.
So did Pipe Dream. Directed by newcomer Harold Clurman, it did not strike the New York critics as a very good thing. It did no better than Me and Juliet, gaining only one favorable notice. Among the dissenters, Robert Chapman observed, “Rodgers and Hammerstein … are too gentlemanly to be dealing with John Steinbeck’s sleazy and raffish denizens of Cannery Row.” John McClain’s bleak dismissal—“This is a far cry from the exalted talents of the team that produced South Pacific. They must be human after all”23—surely gave Dick and Oscar pause.
In the words of Rodgers looking back years later, “We had simply gone too far away from what was expected…. It had to be compared to other works and that identifiable thing called the Rodgers and Hammerstein image.”24 Pipe Dream closed in the red after 246 performances at the Shubert Theatre, and within a year its promising new stars, Bill Johnson and Judy Tyler, both died, he of a heart attack, she from an automobile accident. Helen Traubel, blamed by many for the show’s lackluster center, would never sing in another Broadway show.
Judging by their work that followed, Pipe Dream marked a turning point for Rodgers and Hammerstein—a turning away from any further experimentation of the sort that had made them so interesting to anticipate and watch. They now settled artistically downward into a pattern of offering the public their high standards of craft in commercially risk-free properties. For the fledgling medium of television they were given the rare opportunity to adapt Cinderella, and they brought off the assignment in high style, with a bright score containing some of Rodgers’s most exhilarating waltzes. Hammerstein’s verse, while rarely measuring up to his best work, was more than suitable and contained some gems. His witty “What’s the Matter with the Man,” in which Cinderella’s homely stepsisters bemoan her appeal to the prince, was the sharpest of the lot. “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” was an intriguing twist on the standard love song, wherein the Prince and Cinderella thoughtfully engage in a dialogue on the nature of physical attraction.
It is thrilling to remember that Cinderella was filmed before live cameras in a relatively small space when television was still in its infancy. The meticulously rehearsed production cavorted, skipped and soared before a succession of artful camera angles. “Waltz for a Ball” was particularly memorable for its quick yet magisterial movements, deftly designed to fill out every area of the limited space. Staged with inspiration by choreographer Jonathan Lucas, it remains one of the most uplifting dance numbers ever seen in a musical.
Transmitted across 245 stations on March 31, 1957, Cinderella was seen by 107,000,000 viewers, and the original cast album sold well. Rodgers and Hammerstein were once again on top—and soon back on Broadway, with Flower Drum Song, actually a more engaging show than today’s critics believe it to have been. Consistently amusing, light hearted, freshly melodic, it breezed across the boards, gleaming with a sparkling professionalism that was a joy to behold. The atmospheric score evokes the jumbled clash of occidental and oriental cultures in San Francisco’s bustling Chinatown. Only one of the fine songs—“You Are Beautiful,” recorded by both Johnny Mathis and the Stylistics—entered the top 100 charts. Best remembered today is the now culturally despised “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” introduced with belting force and pizazz by Pat Suzuki, the Asian Merman.
In their haste to make Flower Drum Song fool-proof at the box office, Dick and Oscar turned the dramatic novel on which it was based into musical comedy. Joseph Fields was engaged to co-script the libretto, and he inserted topical jokes. Gene Kelly was brought in to direct, and he provided buoyant pacing throughout. Further to insure against uncommercial seriousness, Oscar undercut the novel’s dramatic climax, the suicide of Helen Chao, by removing it altogether. For her grief as the woman used in a one-night stand, Chao was given the show’s most powerful ballad to sing, “Love Look Away.” So Rodgers and Hammerstein deprived themselves of another chance to accomplish something more dramatic on the level of Carousel or The King and I. Did they never pause to note the key role that death had played in all four of their major works?
Nevertheless, with this safer road to the box office they pulled off a modest success, and they could add two raves and four positive write-ups to their scrapbook. Some reviewers spotted the old magic, if a tad more manufactured. “There is a formalized air about Flower Drum Song,” reported Frank Aston, “but there can be no doubt about it—here is a walloping hit.”25 Aside from reservations for “uninspired jokes,” Variety’s Hobe Morrison reported, “Rodgers and Hammerstein are back in business…. The master collaborators practically never miss … a supple and, with few exceptions, convincingly motivated book…. Flower Drum Song has what it takes for average audiences and hefty box office…. It’ll do.”26 Not so for Kenneth Tynan, one of the doubters nauseated by excessive cuteness and good will: “Simply a stale Broadway confection wrapped in spurious Chinese trimmings … a world of woozy song.”27
From Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California U.S.A., to the Swiss Alps. For their next safe venture, Dick and Oscar turned to the saga of the Von Trapps, an Austrian family of singers who escaped the Nazi takeover of their country. Who could have guessed that the R&H collaboration would end in such a blaze of glory? With Oscar facing his own death sentence—having been the year before diagnosed with terminal cancer—it would seem blasphemous to fault him for having erred excessively in the affirmative. After all, hope and mercy were his enduring mantras.
The stricken Mr. Hammerstein in those last months did, remarkably, muster the will to pen some of his better lyrics. In the deceptively simple “Do Re Mi,” his gifts are on full display. Somehow, Hammerstein found a way to turn each of the notes of the scale into an image, and to fit them all perfectly into a tight, delightful little puzzle. What, for instance, to do with the impossible “la”? According to O.H., “la” is a note to follow “sew.” One would be hard pressed to find a more cleverly wrought lyric.
Anchored to a durable old fashioned libretto, the work of aging veterans Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, Dick and Oscar delivered a first rate set of original songs, overall their best work since The King and I. Rodgers told Tony Thomas what a joy his work at the piano had been: “I had the time of my life. The stuff just rolled off.”28 And much of it would roll famously on, achieving long-lasting favor with the public. Tony Bennett’s “Climb Every Mountain” and Patti Page’s “The Sound of Music” made it onto the pop 100 charts, as did “My Favorite Things,” recorded by none other than Herb Alpert and destined to become the darling of jazz musicians and cabaret singers.
Two unusual numbers give the stage musical version cynical relief. (And, as Walter Kerr sensed on opening night, certain patrons to the exceedingly cheery The Sound of Music might ache for a little cynical relief.) Despite the fact that by this time they usually seemed unable or unwilling to convey anything but optimism, Dick and Oscar broke the pattern with the blase “How Can Love Survive” and a gem about amoral political compromising, “No Way to Stop It.” Calling to mind a Kingston Trio-style song of the day, “No Way” amounted to perhaps the first rock song ever introduced in a Broadway musical. Oddly enough, it is an anti-protest song.
On its way to Broadway, the show won Variety’s approval as a flat-out “sensational musical.”29 And when The Sound of Music opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on November 16, 1959, contrary to a lingering myth advanced by even Richard Rodgers himself about it getting mixed reviews, the critical enthusiasm (three raves and three favorable notices) was decisive. In fact, there was only one unfavorable opening night review. Brooks Atkinson, who found it occasionally “glorious,” was quick to note a superior achievement from the masters: “The best of The Sound of Music is Rodgers and Hammerstein in good form … but the scenario … has the hackneyed look of the musical theatre [they] replaced with Oklahoma.”30 Beyond the feared and revered jury of those seven newspaper critics, dissenters on the sidelines included Kenneth Tynan, of the New Yorker, calling it “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great leap backward.”
What happened a few years later may be a testament more to the commercial avarice of Mr. Rodgers, self-professed non-businessman, than to the talented humanity of Mr. Hammerstein: When the film version was made, several years after Mr. Hammerstein’s passing, Mr. Rodgers wrote two new songs for it himself, for which he also supplied the lyrics, and he allowed the movie not to include “How Can Love Survive?” “No Way to Stop It,” and “An Ordinary Couple.” By then, there was no way to stop him. For a time, the three deleted songs were even left out of at least one national road company of the stage show; the Rodgers and Hammerstein office likely figured they could sell more tickets by duplicating the movie score. This resulted in the unprecedented act of gauchely inserting into a Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical songs with lyrics not written by Mr. Hammerstein, but by someone else—Mr. Rodgers. Worst of all, the two numbers (which seem to caricature the worst of Rodgers and Hammerstein) are noxiously saccharine, adding that much more nauseating wonderfulness to an already sugar-intense work. For the record, they go by the names “Something Good” and “I Have Confidence In Me.” Maybe we should not be surprised—only mildly infuriated—to note that in the end the team of Rodgers and Rodgers was not up to the sound of music.