Culture | The moon on their wings

The great second act of Rodgers and Hammerstein

A skilful double biography of the leading duo of musicals

Songs they will sing for a thousand years
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Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution. By Todd Purdum. Henry Holt; 400 pages; $32. To be published in Britain in May; £25.

AT THE age of 46 Oscar Hammerstein was living as a country squire on his Pennsylvania farm, apparently washed up. It was 14 years since he had written his last hit, “Show Boat”, a landmark musical in its embrace of a gritty subject, race. Meanwhile Richard Rodgers remained, at 39, one of Broadway’s marquee composers; but he was contemplating a future without Lorenz Hart, a lyricist and his long-standing collaborator, who had become a shiftless alcoholic. The stage was set for one of the grandest second acts in entertainment history. From 1941 until Hammerstein’s death in 1960 his partnership with Rodgers yielded an anthology of musical theatre’s greatest hits: “Oklahoma!”, “Carousel”, “South Pacific”, “The King and I” and “The Sound of Music”.

These days the duo’s popularity is sometimes held against them, as if they were merely purveyors of mawkish schlock. “Something Wonderful”, Todd Purdum’s skilful dual biography, strips away the accretions of time and reputation to retrieve the craft and dynamism with which his subjects created a new kind of musical. He contends that their early work, in particular, should be considered an antecedent of today’s edgier, more subversive Broadway fare, as fresh in its time as “Hamilton” seems now.

Rodgers and Hammerstein were unlikely revolutionaries. They resembled a “couple of chiropractors”, according to Groucho Marx. Far from being agitprop provocateurs, their ingenuity was driven strictly by the artistic need to resolve dramatic problems. In the play from which “Oklahoma!” was sourced, for example, “nothing much happens,” writes Mr Purdum. From this predicament they conjured a mould-breaking musical, the first to combine dance and drama, while ditching the prefatory all-cast chorus that was customary, and grappling with naturalistic issues and characters.

Their previous, separate output had introduced these elements individually, but they had never been integrated. The effect was to impart a new, all-singing, all-dancing dramatic coherence to the form. Mr Purdum captures the flexibility of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most beloved numbers. Songs such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone” soared over Broadway’s footlights, taking on a life of their own as free-floating anthems. Yet, in context, they accomplished the more earthbound dramaturgical task of nimbly developing character or advancing plot without turgid exposition.

For all the unabashed sentimentality of their lyrics, they were hard-nosed about their work behind the scenes. The most thrilling sections of “Something Wonderful” pull back the curtain on the “surgery” Rodgers and Hammerstein performed on their musicals during pre-Broadway “try-outs” in New Haven and Boston. Mr Purdum recounts the clinical dispassion with which the pair picked apart their scripts on the basis of audience reception, ruthlessly culling scenes and songs. “Now I see why these people have hits,” remarked John Fearnley, a stage manager, after watching one of these sessions. “I never witnessed anything so brisk and brave in my life.”

They emerge as eminently practical innovators, professional artists toiling in a commercial medium to serve what Hammerstein described as “A big black giant/Who looks and listens/With thousands of eyes and ears/A big black mass/Of love and pity/And troubles and hopes and fears”: in other words, the punters. In one telling anecdote, Richard Halliday, husband of Mary Martin—the original leading lady in “The Sound of Music”—suggested she snag “her bloomers on the tree in her opening number”. “All you care about is the show!” he groused when his idea was dismissed. True, Mr Purdum concludes.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The moon on their wings"

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