Can Rodgers and Hammerstein be untethered from their own era?
For about 15 years in the 1940s and ’50s, composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II partnered to produce a succession of popular, pathbreaking musicals, including Carousel, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music. In the nearly six decades since the 1960 death of Hammerstein, the music the duo made together has survived—often heard outside of the shows that first housed it or in new productions of those shows that take liberties with their makers’ intentions.
The brilliance and singability of such songs as “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific and “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music all but assured their entrance into the Great American Songbook. The Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire has been endlessly adapted, altered, and remixed for artistic and commercial purposes—and as is often the case with art, some renditions have strayed quite far from the spirit of the songs in their original context. It is hard to believe that Rodgers and Hammerstein would have nodded approvingly at the slow, sexy cover of “My Favorite Things” that accompanied a 2012 Victoria’s Secret commercial, or Lady Gaga’s interpretation of songs from The Sound of Music during the 2015 Academy Awards, or the way Jerry Lewis annually trotted out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel for his Labor Day telethon.
Perhaps one reason such spectacles seem out of tune with Rodgers and Hammerstein is because the pair reached their artistic apex during an era now long past, a fact reflected in Todd S. Purdum’s enthusiastic, often-enlightening, sometimes-frustrating new book Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution. “In their prime,” Purdum writes, “the partners seemed to stand for the best of America: forward-looking, liberal, innovative, internationalist—progressive both artistically and ideologically.”
Indeed, several of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s best shows are characterized by pie-in-the-sky jubilance of the sort that followed the end of World War II—like a musical theater equivalent of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day in Times Square. Consider the enthusiastic endorsement of ordinariness in “A Wonderful Guy” in South Pacific, in which Ensign Nellie Forbush revels in her own schmaltziness; or the lovely mix of expectation and certitude in the reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” in The Sound of Music when Maria von Trapp affirms to young Liesl that she will find a romantic partner, to which the girl first replies “when that happens” before correcting herself to say “after it happens”—a winning acknowledgment of the inevitability of true love. The very titles of such songs as “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” from South Pacific and “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from The King and I, Purdum writes, “evoked the infectious, ebullient, can-do optimism of the era.” Rodgers, responding to charges of sentimentality leveled at The Sound of Music, put it even more bluntly: “Anyone who can’t, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted.”
At the same time, Rodgers and Hammerstein retained a clear-eyed pragmatism about human failings and foibles. In South Pacific, Nellie must rid her mind of racism in order to embrace her beau, Emile de Becque, and his half-Polynesian children; and Lt. Joe Cable has to weigh setting aside his highfalutin Philadelphia family’s plans for him before committing himself to the Tonkinese girl Liat. Likewise, Carousel is sufficiently sophisticated to admit that the feelings that pass between partners are seldom straightforward; the show makes plain that Julie Jordan cares for Billy Bigelow in spite of his brutishness and that the child born of their tempestuous union would have done well to have grown up with any father, even one as foolhardy as Billy. Said Hammerstein: “I can’t conceive of an unregenerate soul, I can’t conceive of a dead-end to any kind of existence.”
The strength of Purdum’s book is in its descriptions of its two subjects’ careers and collaboration. In choosing to enter the field of musical theater, librettist Hammerstein (1895-1960) was honoring the trades of both his grandfather, theater producer Oscar Hammerstein I, and his father, theater manager William Hammerstein. Purdum reveals that neither man made as big an impression as his mother, the former Alice Nimmo. “Without ever punishing me, and without ever seeming stern, she had a way of letting me know when she meant a thing to be done or not to be done,” Hammerstein said of his mother’s virtues; he might as well have been describing the tough but humane approach he took in presenting his characters’ flaws.
The personal and the professional again overlap in Hammerstein’s comments about his mother’s death. “I never feel shaken by death, as I would have been if this had not happened to me when I was fifteen,” Hammerstein said. “I received the shock and took it, and sort of resisted as an enemy the grief that comes after death rather than giving way to it.” Here, is Hammerstein not commending the virtues vouched for in “You’ll Never Walk Alone”? That song, wrongly thought of as mawkish, commends strength in grappling with life’s trials and tribulations—coaxing listeners, as Hammerstein might put it, to receive shocks and take them.
Purdum superbly sketches Hammerstein, pausing to comment on his sturdy build—at 6-foot-1-and-a-half, he was “quite tall for his day”—and snappy sense of style. “In his prime, he favored English shoes, from Peal & Co., and shirts, from Turnbull & Asser, and when white dinner jackets were in vogue, he dared to wear a salmon pink one to a Hollywood party,” writes Purdum, who also acknowledges the lyricist’s distinctive manner of speaking. “He spoke in an accent that, to the modern ear, sounds almost dese, dems, and dosey (pronouncing ‘board’ as ‘bawd,’ ‘working’ as ‘woiking,’ and ‘fast’ as ‘fay-ast’).”
The author is no less precise in evoking composer Rodgers (1902-1979), who—as with Hammerstein—seemed guided by kismet to his eventual career. His father, William Rodgers, was a doctor (seemingly responsible for instilling hypochondria in his son), but family time was spent at the piano. “There was music every day, every day, every day,” said Rodgers, whose mother, Mamie, had a gift for sight-reading. “And curiously it was show music,” he said.
Their eventual work together was dependent on a series of happy accidents. In 1929, Rodgers—then in the midst of a run of shows created with lyricist Lorenz Hart—took up residence in a penthouse apartment in the Lombardy Hotel. His neighbor? Author Edna Ferber, whose novel Show Boat had been reworked into a revolutionary musical by Hammerstein and his then-partner, composer Jerome Kern. Twelve years later, Rodgers and Ferber were mulling an adaptation of her novel Saratoga Trunk when Hammerstein’s name came up—call it six degrees of musical-theater separation. Four years after that, each man independently alighted upon material worth adapting together: Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs. When Rodgers commended it to Hammerstein, the lyricist answered: “I don’t have to read it. I know it and I’m crazy about it. I’d love to do it with you.” Such was the start of their first collaboration, Oklahoma!
Purdum offers a keen-eared appreciation of Rodgers’s melodies, which “turn and twist in surprising ways,” and of Hammerstein’s agility with words, noting of the construction of “My Favorite Things” that “critics have mocked the song for celebrating the prosaic and quotidian, but Oscar’s notes show that he labored over it with the care of a master craftsman.”
Purdum is less successful, however, in his attempts to make Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows accessible, or acceptable, to modern readers. Despite being an enthusiastic, well-informed devotee of the duo, Purdum too often writes in ways that reflect our time more than theirs. For example, in a discussion of the musical Flower Drum Song, he is unable to let pass without mention that eternally charming, entirely unobjectionable commendation of femininity, “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” which he describes as “sexy” but “sexist, by modern lights.” He describes the touching, earnest plot of their Allegro as “a bit baffling from a distance of seventy years.”
Purdum also missteps in emphasizing aspects of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s personal lives that seemingly conflict with their work, such as Rodgers’s alcoholism and Hammerstein’s dalliance with a showgirl. There is nothing wrong with including these biographical details in a book of this sort; they belong there, and many readers would note their absence. The problem is that Purdum seems to want to juxtapose unsavory biographical details with the content of the art in a way that suggests his subjects were hypocrites or that at least will supposedly complicate our understanding of the art. But such personal stories don’t improve our critical understanding of the art one iota. And it is difficult to imagine that theatergoers who find lessons in South Pacific or solace in Carousel will set aside their sincere responses upon learning that, for example, Hammerstein was not especially warm and fuzzy in interacting with his children.
Less troubling but still striking is Purdum’s mostly uncritical endorsement of present-day producers who are persuaded of the need to enliven or alter Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows (in contrast to Rodgers’s demand that productions “display an amber-like fidelity to the original staging,” as Purdum puts it). Yet does not much of the pleasure of spending time with works of art from earlier eras in America—from the landscapes of Andrew Wyeth to the films of Frank Capra—derive from encountering styles and sensibilities of the past? That is one reason we are fortunate to have film versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals produced during the artists’ lifetimes; they have lastingly preserved the original spirit of the shows, if not always the letter.
Of course, modern artists can—indeed should—continue to interpret Rodgers and Hammerstein, but the results are most coherent if the artists put themselves in the minds of the men who made the music. Lady Gaga can sing the notes of The Sound of Music, but her hip, protean persona is profoundly at odds with the show’s devotional tone, resulting in a scrambled, even incomprehensible, performance.
In the end, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows endure because the attitudes they express are not commonly encountered in contemporary culture—such as gratitude for the blessings of life and courage when confronted with the prospect of its end. Purdum is at his most powerfully persuasive not when he strains to link Rodgers and Hammerstein to our time or document their flaws but when he describes the way each embodied his own moral code when it counted, as when they confronted sickness.
In 1955, when Rodgers received a diagnosis of jaw cancer, he took the news stoically, as recalled by his daughter Mary: “Because he’d been waiting for something terrible to happen for so long, when it finally happened he was like, ‘Oh, well, now I’ve got that over with.’ ” Later, when Hammerstein was reckoning with the stomach cancer that would soon claim him, he reacted with the serene fortitude exemplified by “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Hammerstein, in words as poetic as any he ever wrote for a song, told his son James: “I’ve had a good time as a young man. And I’ve had a terrific middle age. The only thing that I’m disappointed in is that I was looking forward to having a really good old age, too.”
