On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, MartyB wrote:
> Thanks for posting this Peter. I thouroughly enjoyed it.

Yer welcome!  Care for another?  :)  (FWIW, while I have seen the film
version of _My Fair Lady_ once, I have never, ever seen _Oklahoma!_.)

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http://www.marksteyn.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=28

. . . And here's his take on Rodgers, Hammerstein and a landmark show,
from the Royal National Theatre programme for Trevor Nunn's 1998
production of Oklahoma!

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Forget all the so-called "firsts" about Oklahoma!: the first musical with
a non-splashy opening, the first to integrate songs and story, the first
dream ballet... You can find precedents for all of them. The real
revolution in Oklahoma! is its title. In 1943, if you'd wanted to pinpoint
a place on the map that was as far off-off-off Broadway as you could get,
that was the very antithesis of Broadway values, Broadway sensibility,
Broadway smarts, if you'd wanted in fact to win First Prize in a Least
Likely Title For A Hit Broadway Musical competition, then Oklahoma! was
the perfect choice. It sounds like an American version of an old West End
joke: enquiring as to how Goodnight, Vienna was doing in Streatham, its
author Eric Maschwitz was told, "About as well as Goodnight, Streatham
would do in Vienna." The notion of Oklahoma! on Broadway is only
marginally less ludicrous. If you're wondering where that exclamation
point came from, I like to think it's from the astounded reactions at
backers' auditions when Rodgers and Hammerstein, their cast and producers
trawled the drawing rooms of Manhattan in a largely fruitless search fur
investors. "Oklahoma!!!!??? Are you nuts?"

In 1943, a Broadway musical was just that: a musical about Broadway, about
a world whose farthest horizons were delineated in Richard Rodgers and
Lorenz Hart's very first hit song:

   "We'll have Manhattan
   The Bronx and Staten
   Island too..."

There were, in those days, 47 other states, but they were mostly off the
map: if musical comedy characters ever did leave town, it was to hick
burgs with names like Stopgap, New Mexico, where Rodgers and Hart's Too
Many Girls takes place. The only point to venturing 'Way Out West' ("where
seldom is heard an intelligent word" -- Lorenz Hart) was to make jokes
about city slickers in cow country. Thus, the big hit in 1943 was supposed
to be a show called Something for the Boys, produced by Mike Todd, the man
who famously dismissed Oklahoma! as "No gags, no gals, no chance."
Something for the Boys had gags, gals, Cole Porter songs, Ethel Merman
belting, and all the usual flim-flam you'd expect from a plot about three
guys from back east inheriting property in Texas. Unlike Mike Todd, R&H
were proposing to take the hayseeds seriously, to write the show from
their point of view. Oklahoma! is set one state north of Cole Porter's
Texas, but it's another world. Not until Rodgers and Hammerstein's chorus
bellowed it out from the footlights in the theatre's all-time greatest 11
o'clock number did the Broadway musical belatedly discover that it knew it
belonged to the land and the land it belonged to was grand! After
Oklahoma! musicals left town and rarely returned: the big hits roamed the
world -- not just Oklahoma and the Maine coast and River City, Iowa, but
Siam, Camelot, the South Pacific.

The two men who claimed Oklahoma Territory for Broadway were a musical
version of Lewis and Clark, the explorers sent out by President Jefferson
to map out a route across the continent and to the Pacific coast. But
Rodgers and Hammerstein opened up the American musical not only to the
American landscape, but to the past as well. Before Oklahoma!, Broadway
musicals were set in the here and now, and packed with topical references
to Eleanor Roosevelt and Artie Shaw and Elsa Maxwell. After Oklahoma!,
Broadway musicals were set in Edwardian London and Weimar Berlin and turn
of the century Anatevka (the setting for Fiddler on The Roof, the 1964
show with which the belle ipoque inaugurated by Oklahoma! drew to a
close). It's a measure of how completely Rodgers and Hammerstein
overhauled the musical that today the last thing you're likely to see on
Broadway is a show set in New York in 1998 with characters making cracks
about Hillary Clinton or O.J. Simpson or Celine Dion...

Strictly speaking, Oklahoma! was not the first musical Richard Rodgers and
Oscar Hammerstein II worked on together. That distinction belongs to Up
Stage and Down, a production presented by the Infants Relief Society at
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1919. It was Rodgers' show: just 16, he
served as composer, lyricist and musical director. But the 23-year old
Hammerstein chipped in with three additional lyrics: "Weaknesses", "Can
It" and "There's Always Room for One More". There was. In May, under the
title Twinkling Eyes, the show, now for the benefit of the Soldiers and
Sailors Welfare Fund, re-opened at the 44th Street Theatre with a new
director -- Lorenz M. Hart. Rodgers and Hart went on to 'Blue Moon', 'My
Funny Valentine', 'The Lady Is A Tramp', and the other fruits of a two
decade exclusive partnership: Hammerstein wound up with pretty well any
composer going, from the most celebrated (Jerome Kern) to the most obscure
(Ben Oakland) to the most unlikely to complain about a lyric (the late
Johann Strauss Jnr.)

The first half of Rodgers' career was summed up by Cole Porter in 'Well,
Did You Evah!':

   "It's smooth!
   It's smart!
   It's Rodgers!
   It's Hart!"

But, if Rodgers was smooth and smart, Hammerstein was foursquare and
earnest. The jazzier the Jazz Age got, the more he recoiled from it. He
wrote about. Mounties calling yoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo across the Canadian
Rockies (Rose-Marie) and the Red Shadow leading the rebel Riffs across the
sands to Morocco (The Desert Song) and dashing aristocrats in search of
ten stout-hearted men in the French colony of New Orleans (The New Moon,
though technically New Orleans was a Spanish colony at that time.) Oh, and
he also wrote Show Boat, after which he spent the 1930s descending bumpily
through The Gang's All Here, Free For All, East Wind, and May Wine, the
one about the Viennese psychiatrist in love with the penniless Baroness
von Schlewitz, who unfortunately prefers Baron Adelhorst. If it's any
consolation to that Viennese shrink, Hammerstein's problem was even worse:
in a musical comedy world, he was in love with operetta.

Rodgers, meanwhile, was beginning to outgrow musical comedy. With Larry
Hart, he'd written a musical with a ballet (On Your Toes) and a musical
with an anti-hero (Pal Joey). Invited by the Theatre Guild to musicalise a
play by Lynn Riggs called Green Grow The Lilacs, Rodgers went as always to
his partner. It seems incredible now that the composer could ever have
considered the brilliant, dazzling Hart for Oklahoma! -- not because at
that time the lyricist's always shaky grip on life was beginning a to
dissolve in an alcoholic blur, but because he'd never shown the slightest
interest in the land or people Oklahoma!'s about. "It's easy to be
clever," Jule Styne, composer of Gypsy, used to say. "The hardest thing is
to be simple." Imagine the title song of Oklahoma! written by Hart, full
of contrived musical-comedy rhymes about an Oklahoma beachcomber with a
diploma in aroma, though that's something of a misnomer. Instead, Hart
told Rodgers he didn't think Green Grow The Lilacs would make any kind of
musical and excused himself. So Rodgers turned to the man he'd last
written with 24 years earlier on Up Stage And Down -- Oscar Hammerstein.

Did they know they were re-inventing the musical? I don't think so -- at
least not until they got out of town, saw how the New Haven audiences
loved it and decided to change their title from the bland, non-specific
Away We Go! to the boldly declarative Oklahoma! There had been
ground-breaking musicals before: not just On Your Toes and Pal Joey, but
Of Thee I Sing!, Porgy and Bess, Lady in the Dark... All of them, though,
were fabulous freaks, weird one-offs. Even Show Boat was too epic, too
special to impart lessons. Oklahoma! is Show Boat discipline applied to
musical theatre's bread and butter: Boy meets girl. Show Boat and Porgy
and Bess were exceptions; Rodgers and Hammerstein made Oklahoma! the rule.

As is often said, this soi-disant landmark of American musical isn't about
anything except who'll take Laurey to the to the box social. That's not
strictly true: Oklahoma! is about Oklahoma, a young territory trembling on
the brink of statehood, and in the triangular relationship between Laurey
and her two suitors Hammerstein slyly reflects all the awkward choices a
society makes to civilise itself. With their very first show, Rodgers and
Hammerstein defined the new musical: the slenderest of plots (invariably
very predictable) but with something big -- huge -- at its heart.

Almost all Hammerstein's best work is about community, what binds it, what
breaks it. If it's not too fanciful a thought, that's what he and Rodgers
brought to musical theatre construction: community. Just as the farmer and
the cowman should be friends, so should the lyricist and the
choreographer, pooling their different strengths for the common good. Or
as Rodgers liked to put it, "In a successful show, the orchestrations
sound the way the costumes look." Before R&H, musicals weren't much
interested in community: they were closer to a rundown high rise project,
where each component sits in its own apartment barely aware of its
next-door neighbours -- here's the catalogue song, here's the dance
chorus, here's the comedic sub-plot. Lest you think this metaphor is in
danger, like those tower blocks, of collapsing on its own shoddy
foundation, consider the character of the peddler Ali Hakim, a throwback
to that hoariest of Broadway cliches, the "Dutch comic". Yet Hammerstein
manages to deploy Ali so that his ridiculous love triangle with Ado Annie
and Will serves as a dramatic counterweight to the drama's principal
triangle. Or take "The Surrey With The Fringe On Top": try to separate the
tune, the lyrics, the underscoring, the dialogue, the tempi changes... You
can't: they're all cunningly knitted together, yet the whole seems as
natural, as easy and as enchanting as, well, a surrey ride.

It seems obvious now, but it wasn't then: let the story dictate the tone,
let the characters find their own singing voice: 'Just A Girl Who Cain't
Say No' for spontaneous Ado Annie, for tentative Laurey, 'People Will Say
We're In Love', a song about not being in love that tells the audience she
is. To fans of his work with Hart, the new Rodgers, for all he connects
with the old, might just as well have landed from the Planet Zongo.
Rodgers' music would never again be as breezily rueful as 'You look
Advantage Of Me' or 'I Wish I Were In Love Again'. This is pure music,
unburdened by textual considerations; Hart wrote his lyrics to the
finished tunes, finding ingenious ways to cling on to their effortless
swing:

   "Beans could get no keener Re-
   Ception in a beanery..."

That's what they call apocopated rhyme. There's little call for such
flashy effects with Rodgers and Hammerstein. In the new partnership, the
words came first, and the music reflects it. Rodgers and Hart is standard
him-and-her love songs; Rodgers and Hammerstein is hymns and hearse: all
those anthemic exhortations -- 'You'll Never Walk Alone', 'Climb Ev'ry
Mountain'; all those corpses -- 'Pore Jud Is Daid', and so is Billy in
Carousel, Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific, the King of Siam... To some
critics, the distinction is that Rodgers and Hart give us great songs, and
that afterwards Rodgers was too busy reinventing himself as a musical
dramatist. That's unfair: these are great songs, too; it's just that
they're so closely tied to plot, point, and character a singer has to dig
a little deeper to make them work independently. But the best pop singers
love Rodgers and Hammerstein: listen to Lena Horne's ravishing 'I Have
Dreamed' or Sinatra's raw, powerful reading, in his late seventies, of
Carousel's 'Soliloquy'. It's more accurate to say that Rodgers simply
trumped himself with Hart, he was concerned to give the crowds what they
call "take-home tunes" -- the songs you whistle the morning after; with
Hammerstein, he gave us take-home shows.

Those who scoff at R&H predictability ought to look more closely. These
guys make the extended dream ballet de rigeur on Broadway ('Laurey Makes
Up Her Mind') and then, in South Pacific, dispense with the choreographer
altogether, staging 'Nothing Like A Dame' so that the horny, frustrated
sailors just stomp about like horny, frustrated sailors. Rodgers
establishes himself as America's waltz king with 'Oh, What A Beautiful
Mornin' and 'Out Of My Dreams' and This Nearly Was Mine', and then in The
King And I, when it comes to his own big dance moment, his 'Merry Widow
Waltz' moment, what does he do? He writes not a waltz, but a polka, the
most romantic -- the sexiest -- polka ever: 'Shall We Dance?'

A few years ago, Andrew Lloyd Webber said to me that he felt Rodgers had
never quite fulfilled his potential because he never attempted a
"through-composed" work, an astonishing statement to those of us who can't
imagine how the tension of Oklahoma!'s auction scene -- when Curly and Jud
bid for Laurey's picnic hamper- would be improved by being sung. What
impresses in Rodgers and Hammerstein is how they always seem to know
what's needed at which point: when to speak, when to sing, when to dance.
Trevor Nunn, director of Cats and Les Misirables and now the National's
Oklahoma!, once said: "When we did Chess in America with a new book, I was
reminded of one of the major pleasures of the musical play -- the moment
when the music enters, when text becomes underscoring, then introduction,
then song -- when something that has been explored in one form then moves
into another."

"Musical play" was a term that had been fitfully used for 40 years before
Oklahoma!, but Rodgers and Hammerstein made it their own. In a way, it
returns us to the oldest forms of theatrical entertainment: after all, for
thousands of years, from the Greeks to the Elizabethans, theatre happily
drew on all elements -- words, songs, masques, ballet, tableaux. The
"straight play" and "sung-through music theatre" are relatively recent
refinements, pushing spoken words and sung words into opposing corners.
Rodgers and Hammerstein pulled off something trickier: they fused the
naturalism of the straight play, the musicality of operetta, the colour
and imagery of musical comedy lyrics and the emotional sweep of dance. Not
bad for one revolution.

Factored into this balancing act is another one -- the see-saw between art
and commerce. In South Pacific, Hammerstein denounces racism in 'You've
Got To Be Carefully Taught', but Rodgers sugars the pill with 'Some
Enchanted Evening' When R&H veer too obviously towards the arty -- like
the self-conscious Allegro with its latterday Greek chorus -- they come a
cropper. Conversely, when they try to be too showbizzy -- like the
backstage musical Me And Juliet -- they can't pull it off. But in the vast
terrain between they're unmatched: Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I
-- not flawed masterpieces like Weill (Street Scene) or Bernstein
(Candide), just regular all-American masterpieces that stack up a pile of
dough. Today, the most admired musical theatre writer is Hammerstein's
pupil, Stephen Sondheim; the most successful is Andrew Lloyd Webber, a
passionate Rodgers devotee. But in different ways both men have broken
faith with the peculiar amalgam of art and showbiz that R&H represent.

As for Rodgers and Hammerstein themselves, it's taken them almost 30 years
to shrug off the burden of their last show, The Sound of Music, a
blockbuster of such proportions that everything about it -- the nuns, the
dirndls, the spectacular grosses -- threatened to obliterate all that came
before -- like Jud Fry, the hired hand with the dirty postcards fuelling
his sexual frustration, fantasising about Laurey in his 'Lonely Room':

   "Her long, yeller hair
   Falls across my face
   Jis like the rain in a storm..."

Boy meets girl ... for real.

Larry Hart, who turned down Oklahoma! because he thought it was dull,
understood. Alan Jay Lerner once told me of an evening he spent with Hart
and Fritz Loewe a few weeks after the show opened. It was wartime and
suddenly, in mid-conversation, there was a blackout. Loewe switched on the
radio: it was playing something from Oklahoma! and Hart's cigar glowed
brighter and brighter as he puffed furiously in the dark. Loewe tuned to
another station: another song from Oklahoma! A third station: still
Oklahoma! and Hart's cigar puffed brighter and faster. Eventually, Loewe
hit a station playing some other tune, and Hart's cigar subsided. When the
lights came on, he resumed the conversation as though nothing had
happened, but Lerner knew better; he described it to me as a man
confronting his own obsolescence. Rodgers and Hart were kids doing the
show in a barn, with Rodgers and Hammerstein, the musical grew up.

--- Peter T. Chattaway ---------------------------
peter@... ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
   claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee

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