Times Book Review on Rodgers and Hammerstein: 'Something Wonderful'

[+ WilliamM]

My first Rodgers and Hammerstein show was "The Sound of Music" in New York i(1960).. I liked the the music & lyrics, the children and Mary Martin, but not much more

 

BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION New York Times

How Rodgers and Hammerstein Created Modern Musical Theater

By JASON ROBERT BROWNMAY 1, 2018

• Certain preconceptions cling to the Rodgers and Hammerstein mythos, and Purdum doesn’t manage to shake our familiar impression of the two as an emotional odd couple: Hammerstein the warm, nurturing, sincere liberal (despite being a notorious tightwad); Rodgers the cold, controlling, inaccessible (and leering) genius. Indeed, the closest Rodgers gets to our sympathies is during the three months he spends in Payne Whitney being treated for depression after the television broadcast of “Cinderella.”
   
  But Purdum shines when demonstrating Hammerstein’s “masterly skills as an adapter and editor” — his understanding of structure and character are on ample display in the chapters detailing the births of “Oklahoma!,”“Carousel” and “South Pacific” — and the book is cleareyed about the faults of his later librettos. In an excerpt from his essential essay “Notes on Lyrics,” Hammerstein castigates himself for the “insincerity” of his early songs, and we see in that moment that his insistence on sincerity above all other values will both bolster his genius and ultimately limit it.
   
   
   
  After the team has their first failure, the ambitious but clumsy “Allegro” in 1947, Purdum writes, “The era of innovation was over for them. The era of empire lay ahead,” and the book likewise moves from the thrill of creation to the more quotidian details of deal making and maintenance as Rodgers and Hammerstein grow from songwriters into theatrical titans. From the shadows emerges the partners’ lawyer, Howard Reinheimer, whose tightfisted and farsighted schemes net “the boys” exceptional wealth and an unprecedented amount of control over their own work. When Joshua Logan has to beg for a writing credit on “South Pacific,” his emasculation and ultimate regret are heartbreaking to read about. (Mary Rodgers on her father’s supposed acumen: “He was an atrocious businessman. He just made a lot of money.”)
   
  Underneath the umbrella of this mammoth partnership, many stories peek out, hinted at but untold. The collaboration and friendship between de Mille and Rittmann — two brilliant women creating their own art and vocabulary in a room run by highly privileged and entitled men — is one such tantalizing thread. Indeed, the women in the stories often make the most incisive impressions, from Diahann Carroll’s conclusion that Rodgers “was really incapable of hearing someone’s point of view without regarding that person as a potential adversary” to the revelation that Alice Hammerstein’s exhaustive research was the real engine behind her father’s lyrics in “Carousel.”
   
  After Hammerstein’s death, the book soldiers dutifully on but the air is out of the balloon. (One moment of blissful relief: a report of Rodgers’s unfulfilled desire to make a musical out of “Arsenic and Old Lace” starring Ethel Merman and Mary Martin!) And yet, Purdum delivers a knockout climax: the rediscovery of the R & H classics that started in earnest with Nicholas Hytner’s galvanizing staging of “Carousel” at London’s Royal National Theater in 1992, the very production that — in concert with Bartlett Sher’s luminous 2008 revival of “South Pacific” — forced me to look at this astonishing body of work with fresh and newly reverent eyes. As the book comes to an end, we see the Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy truly begin to take form — works of theater that not only spoke with searing directness to the times in which they were written, but that have a continual, constantly renewing connection to our hearts and spirits. In giving us access to the world that gave birth to them, Purdum’s authoritative and ultimately moving book brings these masterpieces to light with bracing clarity.
   
  Jason Robert Brown is the composer and lyricist of “Parade,” “The Last Five Years” and “The Bridges of Madison County.” His new album, “How We React and How We Recover,” will be released in June on Ghostlight Records.
  

[JakeParezi]

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