SteynOnline

Fifty years ago - November 16th 1959 - The Sound Of Music opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and, with it, the most successful partnership in theatre history came to a close. A few months later, Oscar Hammerstein was dead, and Richard Rodgers found himself the lone survivor of their 16-year collaboration. I take a look at the last song, and the last days, of Rodgers & Hammerstein here, but here's my take on the previous 16 years, back through Flower Drum Song, and The King And I, and South Pacific and Carousel, to where it all began, with Oklahoma!:

There’s a story of a Sound of Music production meeting where someone nervously wondered whether the show wasn’t just a teensy bit controversial. ‘You mean,’ asked Richard Rodgers, ‘it might upset people who like Nazis?’ That’s Rodgers and Hammerstein for you: family entertainment, safe, undemanding, a sure thing for unadventurous touring managements, an easy vehicle for lazy stars (Nureyev in The King and I), the sort of candy-coated schlock we’d have nothing else but without government subsidy of the arts. Look at these guys in every snapshot: sober neckties, white pocket handkerchiefs, grey-suited, greyer-haired provincial Rotarians flanking Mary Martin or Gertrude Lawrence as if they’re presenting a Sales Clerk of the Month award. These boys are trailblazers? Where to? A suburban cul de sac?

Oh, well. As they say on Broadway, nobody likes it but the public (the West End public, too: in recent years, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music and Carousel have all returned). But, even on Broadway, showfolk don’t love Rodgers and Hammerstein the way they love Rodgers and his first writing partner. Rodgers and Hart is sassy, cynical, metropolitan: ‘We’ll have Manhattan’, and to hell with the world that lies beyond, ‘Way Out West On West End Avenue’. Rodgers and Hammerstein is either way out west or down east in Maine fishing villages peopled by all those dumb clucks whose favourite things include whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and two-on- the-aisle for a junky Sound of Music tour starring someone who used to be in a sitcom: as even an awed R&H biographer, Ethan Mordden, eventually asks, ‘Why would anyone even notice, much less relish, a kettle?’ No wiseacre has to expend much effort demolishing R & H; it’s all in the play: Oklahoma!? ‘The corn is a high as an elephant’s eye’. South Pacific? ‘Corny as Kansas in August.’

Yet even to hurl the songs back scornfully is to acknowledge their potency. What other dramatists have planted their lines so solidly in our lives? Oscar Hammerstein, Ethan Mordden reminds us, invented the clichés of ‘I’m In Love With A Wonderful Guy’ (‘high as a flag on the Fourth of July’): it’s not his fault he did it so well that that they’ve become real clichés. His is an unobtrusive craft, an artless art: his first truly great song, ‘Ol’ Man River’, compresses the bitterness and resignation of an entire race into 24 lines and does it so naturally that most people think it’s a genuine Negro spiritual, as opposed to a showtune cooked up in 1927 by two guys who needed something for a spot in the First Act; similarly, his very last song, ‘Edelweiss’, is invariably assumed to be a genuine Austrian folk tune. Imagine the same number written by Lorenz Hart, full of contrived musical-comedy triple-rhymes about giving your special fraulein some edelweiss so’s you can put your arms around her and cradle vice. With Hart, as with Cole Porter, you hear the lyricist, not the character.

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 for 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: 

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. 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 époque 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 2009 with characters making cracks about Michelle Obama or Simon Cowell...

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!':

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 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." What would Hart have done with the title song of Oklahoma!? Contrived musical-comedy rhymes about an Oklahoma beachcomber with a diploma in aroma?

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 picnicl. 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 clichés, 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: 

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 Miserables and the National Theatre's Oklahoma!, once said to me: "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 in 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, they've spent the last half-century trying to shrug off the burden of their last show, The Sound of Music, a blockbuster of such proportions (it was the highest-earning movie of all time at one point) 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, fantasizing about Laurey in his 'Lonely Room':  

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

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.