IN THE PAST DECADE, Broadway has been reintroduced to the work of an American dramatist whose worldwide fame never quite translated into proper respect. He was an innovator and a craftsman, and yet his name somehow became synonymous with hidebound and creaky traditions. The simplicity of his work was taken for simple-mindedness, and his heartfelt earnestness for sickly treacle. I know this, because I was one of his naysayers, and I have learned to regret my own past opinion of Oscar Hammerstein II. The stunning variety of his contributions to the American musical–in lyrics set to music by the twentieth century’s greatest stage composers, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers, and in the librettos in which he gave those songs a home–has been on display almost continuously of late. The new version of “Oklahoma!,” which opened at the Gershwin Theater in March, is the eighth major Hammerstein show in as many years–a period in which his work has come to dominate the Broadway musical as completely as it did before his death in 1960. “Carousel” was staged at Lincoln Center in 1994 and ran longer than it did in its original 1945 production. That same year, a mammoth revival of the 1927 “Show Boat” originated in Toronto and created a sensation with its fully restored Hammerstein libretto, which used rough racial language. The “King and I” came in 1996, and its two-year run was followed by its conversion into a full-length motion-picture cartoon. “The Sound of Music” returned to Broadway in 1998 and was a huge hit in spite of expectations that any new stage production would only disappoint the tens of millions of fans of the Oscar-winning Julie Andrews movie version. At the same time, ABC turned the 1957 television musical “Cinderella” into a vehicle for pop stars Brandy Norwood and Whitney Houston–and then cast Glenn Close and Harry Connick Jr. in a new version of “South Pacific,” the most expensive television movie ever made. “After Flower Drum Song” appears in New York next fall, only Rodgers and Hammerstein’s three flops will remain unrevived (and I doubt “Allegro,” “Me and Juliet,” and “Pipe Dream” will have second lives, because they really are third-rate). HAMMERSTEIN began his professional career at the age of twenty-three in 1918, and by the time of his death forty-two years later, he had written more enduring material with a greater variety of collaborators than anyone else in American theater or American popular song. While he was a student at Columbia University, his lyrics were set to music by George Gershwin and his future partner, Richard Rodgers. In the 1920s, Hammerstein began co-writing the lyrics and librettos of several enormously popular operettas: “Rose Marie,” for instance, which gave birth to the myth of the noble Canadian Mountie, and “The New Moon,” whose most famous song spoke of “stout-hearted men who will fight for the right they adore.” In 1926, Jerome Kern asked Hammerstein to try his hand at an adaptation of “Show Boat,” Edna Ferber’s sprawling saga about a traveling minstrel show performed on a boat on the Mississippi. Hammerstein and Kern wrote together for the next fifteen years, but the other shows and movies they worked on were thin and did only modestly well. Hammerstein was approached in 1942 by Richard Rodgers, who was fed up with his unstable lyricist, Lorenz Hart. Hammerstein hadn’t produced a major hit since “Show Boat.” But together he and Rodgers would become the most successful team ever to write for the stage. It’s worth noting that 90 percent of the time, Hammerstein wrote the lyrics before Rodgers wrote the music. It has always been far too easy for critics to praise Rodgers’s gorgeous tunes while scorning Hammerstein’s occasionally infelicitous word choices. But the fact is that Hammerstein had a great deal to do with the rhythm and tone of the music to which his lyrics were set. Among Hammerstein’s lyric-writing contemporaries were such wizards as Hart, Cole Porter, and E.Y. Harburg. He couldn’t match their ability to manipulate words and rhymes with scorching wit–and he knew it. In a wonderful 1949 essay on the art of the lyric, Hammerstein wrote: “While I, on occasion, place a timid, encroaching foot on the territory of these . . . masters, I never carry my invasion very far. . . . I admire them and envy them their fluidity and humor, but I refuse to compete with them. Aside from my shortcomings as a wit and a rhymester–or, perhaps, because of them–my inclinations lead me to a more primitive type of lyric.” Unlike Hart, who could rhyme “laughable” with “unphotographable” with uncanny ease, Hammerstein didn’t reek of self-conscious sophistication. His humor was far more broad. The wildly flirtatious Ado Annie, the comic relief in “Oklahoma!,” says of herself, “Other girls are coy and hard to catch, / but other girls ain’t having any fun! / Every time I lose a wrestling match / I have a funny feeling that I won!” These are monosyllabic rhymes of the sort scorned by Hart, but they are entirely appropriate for an uneducated seventeen-year-old girl in 1905 Oklahoma. What’s more, thrilling as lyrical word-brilliance can be, it can harm a song. “A rhyme should be unassertive, never standing out too noticeably,” Hammerstein pointed out. “If a listener is made rhyme-conscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the song.” Hammerstein was, in fact, the opposite of “primitive.” He was something of a visionary. He single-handedly destroyed forty years of theatrical tradition by opening “Oklahoma!” with a simple image of a woman at a butter churn and a single voice singing a cappella offstage. Before his innovation, the first ten minutes of a Broadway musical were often thrown away as the audience got settled. “There was always an opening chorus at the rise of the curtain,” he noted, “and it was never expected that the audience would understand the words. . . . [Then] came a number professionally called the ‘icebreaker’ . . . a fill-in song written to quiet down the audience after the opening chorus and postpone any important action in the story until all the latecomers had been seated.” HE HAD BREACHED tradition sixteen years earlier as well, with the opening of “Show Boat.” The curtain rises on black workers in the 1880s singing: “Niggers all work on de Mississippi, / Niggers all work while de white folks play, / Loadin’ up boats wid bales of cotton, / Gittin’ no rest till de Judgment Day.” The stark image of the suffering levee workers doing manual labor and the grim lyrics they sang were as sobering in 1927 as they are today. And the use of the N-word was as upsetting. The sight and sound of Jim Crow laborers bitterly exclaiming their mistreatment had the effect of stunning the light-hearted Jazz Age Broadway musical audience into a shocked silence, just as the very sound of the word “nigger” can provoke a shocked silence in us. There was one of those maddening and stupid controversies in the early 1990s when the revival of “Show Boat” was first staged in Toronto. Director Harold Prince chose to restore the use of the word “nigger,” which had been bowdlerized for more than fifty years (first to “darkies,” then to “colored folks,” then to “here we all”). A Toronto minister initiated protests, assuming that white producers were bringing back an old minstrel show. In context, it’s obvious how wrongheaded that notion was. The song shows both of Hammerstein’s signature aspects: his ability to compress a range of emotion in very few words, and the depth and breadth of his humanity and compassion. The most heartening aspect of the Hammerstein revivals is the way they reveal the maturity and wisdom at the heart of shows we had all somehow come to consider sickeningly sweet. (Only “The Sound of Music” really does go too far, with dancing nuns in full habit, but it might be pointed out that the libretto was written by others, not by the ailing Hammerstein.) “Lots of things happen to folks,” says Aunt Eller, the voice of common sense in “Oklahoma!,” to her innocent niece in the play’s key speech. “Sickness, and being poor and hungry, even being old and afraid to die. That’s the way it is, cradle to grave. And you can stand it. There’s one way. You got to be hearty, you got to be. You can’t deserve the sweet and tender things in life unless you’re tough.” I had somehow remembered that “Oklahoma!” ended with the cast celebrating the marriage of the farmgirl and the cowboy, shouting “Oklahoma! OK!” It doesn’t. Following that joyous song, there’s a killing on stage. Hammerstein did not wrap his shows up with a nice ribbon. A heartbreaking death occurs in the second act of “Carousel.” One of the key characters in “South Pacific” dies in World War II. The king in “The King and I” dies, as does one of the show’s young lovers. And “The Sound of Music” concludes with the Von Trapp family fleeing the Nazis. These are the kinds of tragedies that require the kind of toughness that makes it possible for Hammerstein’s characters to “deserve the sweet and tender things in life.” His shows deal mostly with inarticulate and ordinary people struggling to make sense of their feelings and the world around them, and yet Hammerstein always gives his characters their emotional and psychological due. IN “OKLAHOMA!,” the character treated with the most remarkable compassion is the villain, Jud Fry (played on Broadway by an actor of titanic gifts, Shuler Hensley). Jud nearly rapes the show’s heroine, Laurey, and twice tries to kill the hero, Curly. And yet Hammerstein makes his frontiersman’s loneliness and hunger for love almost palpable. Jud becomes obsessed with Laurey because she did him a single act of kindness: “Last time I see you alone it was winter, with the snow six inches deep in drifts when I was sick. You brung me that hot soup out to the smokehouse and give it to me, and me in bed. I hadn’t shaved in two days. You asked me if I had any fever and you put your hand on my head to see.” Living in the smokehouse on Laurey’s farm surrounded by pictures of scantily-clad girls from the Police Gazette, he sings bitterly, “I sit by myself like a cobweb on a shelf, / By myself in a lonely room.” It has never been the usual practice for the same person to write the lyrics and the book of a show, but Hammerstein’s talent for doing both was the key to his art. His characters are consistent, whether speaking prose or singing poesy. One of the most striking things about Hammerstein’s work is how often he returned, in both lyrics and story, to the subject of sexual awakening and erotic yearning–and how often he explored these subjects in the voices of young women. “Why should I have spring fever / When I know it isn’t spring?” So sings a “starry-eyed, vaguely discontented” teenage girl who is “as restless as a willow in a windstorm.” She wishes she “were somewhere else / Walking down a strange new street / Hearing words that I have never heard / From a man I’ve yet to meet.” These lyrics come from the exquisite “It Might As Well Be Spring,” which won Hammerstein and Rodgers an Oscar in 1945. The same sort of feelings haunt Magnolia in “Show Boat,” Laurey in “Oklahoma!,” Nellie in “South Pacific,” Tuptim in “The King and I,” and Maria in “The Sound of Music.” They all seek to deny their yearnings, but cannot. “Might as well make believe I love you,” Magnolia sings to Ravenal. “Don’t throw bouquets at me,” Laurey says to Curly. “People will say we’re in love.” This is most memorably rendered in the opening of “Carousel”, in which the antsy young Julie loses her job and her home in turn-of-the-century Maine because she tarries too long with a carnival barker. She is left alone with him on the village green. “I’m never going to marry,” she tells him, “and a girl who don’t marry has got to be much more particular.” He wants to know “how do you know what you’d do if you loved me. Or how you’d feel–or anything.” And she tells him, in the most soaring melody of Rodgers’s astonishing career: “If I loved you, / Words wouldn’t come in an easy way, / Round in circles they’d go. / Longing to tell you but afraid and shy.” Just before they kiss, Julie looks up at the trees and says: “You’re right about there being no wind. The blossoms are just coming down by themselves. Just their time to, I reckon.” That kiss will lead to marriage, and the marriage to disaster, but we are left in no doubt: She is one of those blossoms, and it is her time. He could be as soulful on the subject of domestic contentedness as he is about the mysteries of the erotic. In 1937, he and Kern wrote “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” The song, never one of Hammerstein’s most famous, has been kept alive by cabaret singers like Mel Torme and Andrea Marcovicci–and it offers an indelible portrait of a life well-lived in quiet harmony. It is Hammerstein’s greatest lyric, because it is his purest. “Someday,” a young man tells his sweetheart, “we’ll build a home on a hilltop high, you and I, / Shiny and new.” People will call us “the folks who live on the hill,” he adds, and the song begins to journey through the years. “We may be adding a thing or two, a wing or two. / We will make changes as any family will.” From their veranda, they will have “the sort of view that seems to want to be seen.” And then, with only the word “and” to mark the melting away of the decades, they become old: And when the kids grow up and leave us, We’ll sit and look at that same old view, just we two . . . The folks who like to be called What we have always been called, “The folks who live on the hill.” “The most important ingredient of a good song is sincerity,” Hammerstein wrote. “Let the song be yours and yours alone. However important, however trivial, believe it. . . . Say what is on your mind as carefully, as clearly, as beautifully as you can.” This is superb advice for any writer–or for anyone, for that matter. Oscar Hammerstein II “deserves the sweet and tender” praise of those of us who too often equate dazzle and genius. Hammerstein was not dazzling. But as a popular artist, he was one of the greatest geniuses ever produced in this country. John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
