the blockbuster “oklahoma!” -- 9/26/24
Today's encore selection -- from Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical by Laurie Winer. The first collaboration of the extraordinary tandem of Rodgers and Hammerstein was the blockbuster musical Oklahoma!. Both men had had previous success, but this new musical would take them to unforeseen heights:
"The coming together of Rodgers and Hammerstein was a sweet relief for both men. They knew each other's sensibilities well enough that their artistic connection was fully formed the moment it began. 'When we first started writing together,' Hammerstein said, 'we had no conversations on method.' They had 'no definite policy except one of complete flexibility.' They went to work not on a Ferber adaptation but on the musicalization of a play previously produced by the Theatre Guild, Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs. They discussed the mood and purpose of each song, and almost always Hammerstein penned the lyric first -- a mark of the story's prominence -- although according to Oscar 'in nearly all of our scores, there are at least one or two songs in which [Rodgers] wrote the music first.'
"It was a promising match, but not everyone saw it as a sure thing. Hearing the news, Robert Russell Bennett told Hammerstein, 'You've got yourself another Vincent Youmans there,' referring to the composer of Hammerstein's 1923 hit The Wildflower. What Bennett was saying about Rodgers we can extract from another of his observations about Youmans: 'Something awful happens to very young people who see a lot of money coming in.'
"For his part, Rodgers revealed in a 1961 interview with Arnold Michaelis that he saw himself as the only successful person on the Oklahoma! team. Michaelis had asked for the composer's comment on an intriguing detail that Hammerstein had shared with him. The lyricist said that, over the years, he and Rodgers enjoyed a thought experiment about what they would have told each other if Oklahoma! had been a flop: 'We would tell each other why it was a failure and how ridiculous we were to do what we did -- to open the show with the best song in the show, for instance, to begin with. Who would do that? Forty minutes pass after the rise of the curtain before you see one chorus girl. There's no chorus. Who wants to go to that kind of a musical comedy?' Michaelis asked Rodgers to elaborate on Hammerstein's story. He went in an unexpected direction:
Oh, yes, yes. There was nothing about Oklahoma!, absolutely nothing, to suggest success to anybody. The original play was a flop. Green Grow the Lilacs -- very unsuccessful play. We were being produced by the Theatre Guild, and the directors of the Theatre Guild have said this publicly and in print that this was to be their last show, because it was going to be a flop and that would finish them. I'm not putting them out of business by revealing this because they have said it. Oscar had had nearly eleven years of failures. Mamoulian, the director, couldn't get a job. Agnes de Mille, who did the choreography, had done one job, Rodeo, and that's all. She was William de Mille's daughter; this was her claim to fame. Now, the only person connected with that show who had had success was me. But I was invalidated in everybody's mind because I had worked, for twenty-three years at that time, with Larry, and I was now working with a failure [emphasis mine], and I had to be bad, too. So every single element connected with this show had to spell failure.
"Rodgers discounts Show Boat and all of Hammerstein's earlier work when he characterizes the pre-Oklahoma! Hammerstein as a mere technician: 'I think to say "The corn is as high as a elephant's eye" instead of what Oscar first thought of, which was "cow pony's eye," I think this is brilliant. And I think this is where the man starts to become an artist instead of a workman.'
"At this point, Hammerstein had been dead for a year. I do not believe Rodgers would have ventured this opinion during his collaborator's lifetime.
"Hammerstein's long fight to keep bitterness and alienation at bay paid off in a burst of five words -- 'Oh, what a beautiful mornin'!' Recalling that time in a letter to Elizabeth Rider Montgomery, Hammerstein said, 'This is one of the few songs that I wrote quickly. I would say that I finished it in about three days.' He worked at a tall standing desk in Doylestown, writing with a soft pencil. Rodgers composed the melody in ten minutes, which likewise suggests the ease that presents itself after laying down a heavy burden. For these men at this moment there truly was a bright golden haze on the meadow. Their excitement for a new beginning infused the entire show with an exceptional light.
"For research, Hammerstein sent Rodgers a book of folk songs from the American Southwest. 'I opened the book, played through the music of one song, closed the book, and never looked at it again,' said Rodgers. 'If my melodies were going to be authentic, they'd have to be authentic on my own terms.' At times Rodgers found his sound in the lyrics themselves. In 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,' for instance, Hammerstein's words suggested to Rodgers ' both a clip-clop rhythm and a melody in which the straight, flat country road could be musically conveyed through a repetition of the straight, flat sound of the D note, followed by a sharp upward flick as fowls scurry to avoid being hit by the moving wheels.'
"In fact, playwright Lynn Riggs had relied on the music Rodgers overlooked: 'My intent was to recapture in a kind of nostalgic glow, the great range of mood which characterized the old folk songs and ballads I used to hear in my Oklahoma childhood, their quaintness, their sadness, their robustness, their simplicity .... For this reason I considered it wise to throw away the conventions of ordinary theatricality -- a complex plot, swift action, to try to exhibit luminosity in the simplest of stories, a wide arc of mood and feeling.'
"Hammerstein connected with this search for the elemental. 'Dick and I talked for a long time before we accepted this revolutionary idea of not having any chorus girls in the first forty minutes,' he wrote. His language echoes Riggs, who thought it wise 'to throw away the conventions of ordinary theatricality.' Hammerstein said he and Rodgers 'tried very hard to obey tradition, to invent reasons why the girls should be on. We couldn't find any that didn't seem to hurt the character of the play we were adapting. So we opened the musical play very much as the play opened.'"
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