Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

why she feels the way she does, I deliberately ended the phrase [“I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string”] on the uncertain sound of the F natural (on the word ‘string’) rather than on the more positive F sharp.”31

Rodgers left it up to others to demonstrate how the musical details in Carousel support the lyrics and the libretto and create musical unity, and how such details create subtle correspondences between music, character, and drama. Nevertheless, his description of “musical dialogue” in Love Me Tonight and his analysis of his text-setting objectives in “It Might as Well Be Spring” reveal that Rodgers was fully conscious of how nuances can help a theater composer to achieve an artistic goal. In the light of his autobiography, a discussion of how dotted rhythms, triplets, and arpeggiated accompanimental figures reveal greater dramatic truths appears to be grounded in reality.32 Rodgers is the first to admit that a number of his musicals created with Hart do not even aspire to, much less achieve, the goals he first enunciated in the late 1920s with Dearest Enemy and Peggy-Ann. His primary desire throughout his extraordinary career, however, was to create a musical theater in which the songs belong to their characters and determine their place within the dramatic action, and a musical theater in which dialogue, song, and dance are unified and integrated. These ideals did not suddenly appear with Oklahoma! and Carousel. After developing his vision and evolving technique as a dramatic composer with Hart, Rodgers found a collaborator who fully embraced the integrated ideal. Together, Rodgers and Hammerstein were a winning combination that forged a living and posthumous legacy of popular commercial works and a critical stature unmatched by any other body of work in the history of the American musical.

After the death of his second collaborator, Rodgers, who had by necessity ghost-written lyrics for Hart, decided to write his own lyrics for an entire show. The result, the biracial romance No Strings (1962) with Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley in the principal roles, turned out to be Rodgers’s final success (580 performances), albeit a modest one by the standards of Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. His next show, collaboration with Hammerstein’s lyricist protégé Stephen Sondheim, produced the disappointing, if underrated, Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965 (220 performances).

Rodgers remained active to the end. In the 1970s he managed to mount three final shows on Broadway: Two by Two (1970), with lyrics by Martin Charnin and starring Danny Kaye as Noah (343 performances); Rex (1976), with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and starring Nicol Williamson as Henry VIII (49 performances); and I Remember Mama (1979), with lyrics by Charnin and Raymond Jessel and starring Liv Ullmann and George Hearn (108 performances).33 Less than four months after his fortieth and final musical closed, Rodgers died on December 30, 1979.

Because they float at the center of the mainstream, the convention-shattering features of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s adaptations of literary sources with their carefully constructed subplots (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I) seem less apparent than their more experimental and less successful works with original books. Among the latter are Allegro (1947), with its Greek chorus and abstract sets, and the back stager Me and Juliet (1953), in which audiences could see on- and offstage events simultaneously.34 Just as it is often difficult for present-day listeners to appreciate the iconoclasm of the less noisy modernists (for example, the revolutionary Debussy), it requires a special effort in the post-Sondheim and Lloyd Webber era to understand just how unconventional and innovative Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals really were. Here is a glimpse of what was innovative (if not unprecedentedly new) in three of their shows, a body of work which helped to establish future conventions:

OKLAHOMA! (1943) eschews the usual opening chorus (or singer accompanied by an orchestra) and instead opens with a woman churning butter alone onstage and the hero singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” (without even a piano to back him up) offstage. It also presents perhaps the first genuine, albeit pathetic, villain who dies in a struggle with a hero, and its full-length dream ballet moves several steps beyond On Your Toes in its integration of dance into the plot.

SOUTH PACIFIC (1949) offers the first major middle-aged romantic hero played by the first major defector from the Metropolitan Opera (Ezio Pinza). The younger romantic secondary male character dies, and the central romantic leads sing “Twin Soliloquies” to themselves “silently.” The drama is conveyed through rapid and seamless scene shifts, and, most provocatively, the musical seriously explores the causes of racial prejudice in the song “Carefully Taught.”

THE KING AND I (1951), based at least loosely on a true story and real people, is the first major musical in which the characters (if not the cast) are mostly Asian, a foreign language is conveyed by instruments rather than by speech, the principals never kiss and touch only once, when they are dancing, and the central male character dies at the end (and, unlike Billy Bigelow, stays dead).

Carousel (1945) was no less daring. It revolves around an unsympathetic character (when he is not singing) who hits his wife, sings a “Soliloquy” for nearly eight minutes before attempting a robbery, dies by suicide, and hits his daughter when he returns to earth (from purgatory) fifteen years later. Musicals of various types after Oklahoma! and Carousel would continue to be remembered by their songs, of course, but from now on their revivability would usually depend on integrated and more coherent books. Although by no means did they invent the so-called integrated Broadway musical (often referred to as the “sung play”), or even always adhere to the elusive integrated ideal, more than anyone else Rodgers and Hammerstein can be praised (or blamed) for demonstrating in their optimistic, homespun, and sentimental shows the commercial potential of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

CHAPTER TEN

KISS ME, KATE

The Taming of Cole Porter