They are America's most successful song writers, winners of 34 Tonys, 15 Oscars, 2 Pulitzers, 2 Grammys and 2 Emmys. They were very skilled businessmen who controlled their product and maximized their revenue. The created Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. "Oklahoma! was the first musical to fully integrate song, story and dance in the service of a realistic narrative and character development, revolutionizing the Broadway theater forever." They were also the producers for other works such as Annie Get Your Gun and I Remember Mama. In October, 1957, their 90-minute live television presentation of Cinderella preempted Ed Sullivan and was watched by 107 million people, two-thirds of the country's population. Walking through Disney World today, one of the theme songs in the background is Surrey With the Fringe on Top. They created the modern musical; their songs permeate our culture.
Ockie Hammesrstein had it easy. He was born into the business, seamlessly slid into a job, and began producing and creating in the 1920's. He had middling success until he teamed up with Jerome Kern and created Showboat in 1926. He tried his hand in Hollywood and felt he was over the hill, done for and a has been by the early '40's. Richard Rodgers grew up in a prosperous musical house and was writing musicals with Lorenz Hart while still a teenager. They had a run of successful shows in NY and London, and in the late '30's, they created hit after hit including I'd Rather Be Right, starring George M. Cohan, On Your Toes, featuring a George Balanchine ballet, and Pal Joey, which brought a new depth of character development to a musical, and featured Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. However, Hart's drinking brought an end to their collaborations.
The play Green Grow The Lilacs was written in France by a young man trying to recreate his youth in Indian Territory. It had a brief run in NY in the early '30's but had made an impression on both Rodgers and Hammerstein, who decided in 1942 to do it together. It took Hammerstein three weeks to write Oh What A Beautiful Mornin and ten minutes for Rodgers to bang out the tune. They created, raised money, hired the cast and the director, arranged for the orchestration and took it on the road. Oklahoma! premiered on March 31, 1943 and was an instant sensation. It ran for a little over five years. It was the most successful musical ever and perfectly matched the mood of a nation fighting a war to build a better world. Seventy-five years later, it still stirs the soul.
They worked together on a redo of State Fair before adapting a turn of the century Hungarian drama called Liliom, which they turned into Carousel. Backed by the same creative teams, it previewed out of town and was severely panned in Boston. Reworked and cut by almost a third, it opened April 19, 1945 to rapturous reviews. It featured You'll Never Walk Alone and If I Loved You. It was Dick Rodgers favorite of them all.
They then turned Michener's loosely connected Tales into the majestic South Pacific. It won every award imaginable, including the Pulitzer, and launched what the author calls the empire phase of their careers. Anna and the King of Siam became the King and I, which required more pre-Broadway cutting than any of their other works. It was also a resounding success. They finally began to allow Hollywood to film their works. They actually produced Oklahoma themselves and let the studios do Carousel and The King and I. They succeeded spectacularly with their tv production of Cinderella. To be fair, the 50's were not all magic for them as both Pipe Dream and Me and Juliet were flops and Lerner and Lowe was pushing them with My Fair Lady. Rodgers had had cancer surgery a few years back, drank too much and had a breakdown after Cinderella. He spent three months in a high-end private hospital in Manhattan. They produced the film version of South Pacific in 1958. Because they had allowed their long-time director to use ill-advised color filters throughout, the critics panned it. Rodgers thought it was "awful." But as the author points out, the material was "indestructible", a smashing success and the album sat atop the charts for a year. They followed up with Flower Drum Song which was, at best, ok, but paled compared to what Oscar's protege, Stephen Sondheim, had done with West Side Story. Their final magical transformation was to convert a 1956 German movie, Die Trapp Familie into The Sound of Music. While the show was in previews in Boston, Hammerstein, dying of stomach cancer, penned his last work, Edelweiss. The show opened in late 1959 and the New York reviewers felt it was too old fashioned. The public disagreed. The cast album and the later movie soundtrack made The Sound of Music the "best selling Broadway score of all time."
Ockie died at 65 on August 22, 1960. Rodgers would struggle to find his footing for the balance of the almost twenty years he had left. He was involved with the capstone of their career, the movie version of The Sound Of Music. The film was panned as saccharine by the NY critics, but won the Best Movie Oscar and is so revered in American society that Lady Gaga and Julie Andrews reprised songs for the Oscar show fifty years later. He tried his hand at a few things, but there was no magic left. He had a heart attack in the late 60's, that was followed up by the removal of a cancerous larynx. He died at the end of 1979 as an Oklahoma revival opened on Broadway. "As had been done for Oscar Hammerstein nineteen years earlier, the lights of the Broadway that Richard Rogers had changed forever were darkened in his honor."
In the '70's and '80's, their "wholesome, cheery land" fell out of favor. Some blamed them for America's Vietnam policies because of the western exceptionalism in South Pacific and The King And I. It was a passing fad as revivals in both NY and London returned them to their rightful place. It has been estimated that "Rodgers ranks as the most-played composer of any kind of music, ever." Hammerstein's lyrics are part of our everyday life. I grew up in a house where the 78rpm albums for Oklahoma, The King and I and South Pacific played often. I love the theater, am happy to have introduced my daughter to it and am looking forward to an Oklahoma show next week with Lauren and her daughter Eloise. What more could anyone ask of such magnificent artists than to have enriched the lives of generations.
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