Though Dick and Oscar had worked with the top names in their business, and though they would help create any number of new stars, they preferred to let their shows take the spotlight. And while they would prove terrific at spotting new talent, they also preferred to work with known commodities. So the part of Laurey went to Joan Roberts, who had been in Sunny River for Oscar, and Curly would be played by Alfred Drake, a veteran of Dick’s Babes in Arms. Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted the gangly Charlotte Greenwood, who had been a Broadway star since the teens but was now busy as a character actress in Hollywood, as Aunt Eller, but she was unavailable, so they settled for Betty Garde, a well-known radio performer. Lee Dixon, a veteran song and dance man, was cast as Will Parker; the Yiddish actor Joseph Buloff as the peddler; and Howard Da Silva, a onetime steelworker from Cleveland, as Jud Fry, who lives in a filthy smokehouse with a collection of dirty postcards and an even bigger collection of resentments. The solo that Dick and Oscar would write for Jud, “Lonely Room,” is a brooding soliloquy of angry despair unlike anything ever heard before in a Broadway musical:
The floor creaks,
The door squeaks,
There’s a field mouse a-nibblin’ on a broom,
And I set by myself
Like a cobweb on a shelf,
By myself in my lonely room.
(It would become Mary Rodgers’s favorite of her father’s songs.)
Celeste Holm, a twenty-five-year-old actress and singer who had appeared in the Theatre Guild’s production of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life that also featured Gene Kelly, auditioned for the soubrette role of Ado Annie. Oscar had conceived the character as a girl who simply “cain’t say no” to any would-be suitor. Holm had been warned not to sing a Rodgers song, since he was known to be finicky about how his own music was performed, but was told not to sing a song by another popular composer, either. So she chose a Schubert art song, “Who Is Sylvia?” and as she headed to the stage, she fell down a short flight of steps, music flying. “That was funny,” Rodgers told her. “Could you do it again?” But he was concerned. “You have a trained voice,” he said. “I’d like you to sing it as if you’d never had a lesson in your life—a bold, unedited farm girl voice.”
In response, Holm blurted out, “I can call a hog.”
“I dare you,” Rodgers countered.
“So I did,” Holm would recall. “None came. But that’s how it happened.”
The other auditions, conducted before potential backers to raise the needed money for the show, were painful exercises. Rodgers and Hammerstein trooped to penthouses and town houses, wooing wealthy angels, with the help of Drake and Roberts singing the main songs. At one elaborate session held in the home of the socialite Natalie Spencer, a residence so grand that it had its own ballroom, they pulled out all the stops and still raised not a penny. The show was “too clean,” Lawrence Langner would recall. “It did not have the suggestive jokes, the spicy situations, the strip-teasers and the other indecencies which too often went with a successful musical of those days.”
Indeed, perhaps the best way to understand just what this new show would not be is to cast a glance at another then in the works, one that passed for the epitome of sophisticated Broadway fare: Cole Porter’s Something for the Boys, produced by Michael Todd and starring Ethel Merman. It was a smart-alecky, wised-up romp about three cousins who inherit a ranch next to a military base outside San Antonio. They decide to turn it into a hotel for servicemen’s wives, but the local commander mistakes it for a brothel and complications ensue. The score featured Porter’s trademark risqué topical songs and a torchy ballad for Merman. It made jokes about Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower and the meatless days imposed by wartime rationing. The climax came when Merman intercepts radio transmissions through the fillings in her teeth, saves a distressed plane, and ends the military brass’s boycott of her hotel. “The entire show was a bald contrivance,” one theater historian would write, but Life magazine called it “gay and glittering,” and it would last for 422 performances, a phenomenal run for its day. Something for the Boys was a musical comedy, all right. Whatever the Theatre Guild was cooking up was something else altogether.
* * *
AS THE FALL of 1942 dragged on into winter, the project was getting to be known up and down Broadway as “Helburn’s Folly,” and on the way to yet one more backers’ audition, she had a suggestion for Hammerstein. “Terry said to me, ‘I wish you and Dick would write a song about the earth,’” Oscar would recall. “Coming out of a clear blue sky, the suggestion shocked me … I forget what I said. I remember what I thought. I thought it was one of the silliest and vaguest ideas I had ever heard. Now the strange fact is that two days later, I had written a lyric which I never intended to write.” The lyric Oscar wrote was indeed a hymn to the land, to the possibilities of statehood and a new life together for Laurey and Curly. Aunt Eller would start the verse, joined by Laurey and Curly, who would then sing the rousing chorus:
They couldn’t pick a better time to start in life!
It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late.
Startin’ as a farmer with a brand-new wife—
Soon be livin’ in a brand-new state!
Brand-new state
Gonna treat you great!
Gonna give you barley,
Carrots and pertaters—
Pasture for the cattle—
Spinach and termayters!
Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom—
Plen’y of air and plen’y of room—
Plen’y of room to swing a rope!
Plen’y of heart and plen’y of hope.…
Oklahoma,
Where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain
And the wavin’ wheat
Can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain …
There had been no such notion, no such sentiment, anywhere in Green Grow the Lilacs. The new song envisioned a bigger and better future for the protagonists. As it turned out, it spelled a bigger and better future for the show itself.
If Terry Helburn sparked Oscar’s creativity, Hammerstein could also be his own muse. He took a single line of Aunt Eller’s dialogue from Green Grow the Lilacs—about how territory folks “orter hang together”—to create a stirring second-act opening number about the civic obligations of incipient statehood, “The Farmer and the Cowman.”
And when this territory is a state,
And jines the union jist like all the others,
The farmer and the cowman and the merchant
Must all behave theirsel’s and act like brothers.
The Guild had decided to invest $25,000 of its own capital (leaving it with just $15,000 in emergency reserves), and a private pool of regular backers (including the producer Lee Shubert) put in another $15,000. But that still left Langner and Helburn less than halfway to their goal of $90,000. MGM already owned the film rights to Green Grow the Lilacs, so Helburn asked the studio for a direct investment in the musical, but it wasn’t interested. Helburn persisted: If MGM owned the film rights, how could the Guild attract other investors, who would rightly worry that the new musical’s film prospects would be encumbered? So MGM granted the Guild an option to buy the rights to Riggs’s original play within thirty days of the opening.
Then the Guild approached Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, a scrappy, second-tier studio, arranging a private audition just for him. He liked the show, but his board of directors resisted. So Cohn agreed to invest $15,000 of his own money, provided that Max Gordon, who then had a production deal at the studio and had told Oscar that he was done with Broadway musicals for good, anted up an equal sum—which Gordon reluctantly did.
* * *
FROM THE BEGINNING, dance was envisioned as a vital part of the show, and Helburn and Langner had a particular inspiration, a struggling young choreographer named Agnes de Mille. The daughter of the film director William de Mille (and the niece
of his more famous brother, Cecil B. DeMille, who capitalized his “d”), she had been kicking around Hollywood and New York for more than a decade. She had recently been commissioned by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo to choreograph Rodeo, a suite of western dance music by Aaron Copland. Langner and Helburn invited Rodgers and Hammerstein to join them on opening night, October 16, and the next day, Helburn sent de Mille a telegram: WE THINK YOUR WORK IS ENCHANTING. COME TALK TO US MONDAY.
But Dick and Oscar had their doubts. Was this untested talent up to the task of choreographing a Broadway show, and one on which so much was already riding? After de Mille met up with Hammerstein in a drugstore on 57th Street and pleaded her case, the partners relented, and de Mille laid down her own strict rules in her first working meeting with Hammerstein.
“First, I informed him, I must insist that there be no one in the chorus I didn’t approve,” she would recall. “I sat up quite straight; as I spoke I looked very severe. ‘Oh, pshaw,’ he murmured. He was sorry to hear I was going to take that attitude—there was his regular girl, and Lawrence Langner had two, and Dick Rodgers always counted on some. For one beat, I took him literally, there being no trace of anything except earnestness in his face, and then I relaxed on that score for the rest of my life.” (In fact, Rodgers did usually have a regular girl in his shows.)
De Mille would wind up fighting bitterly at times with Dick and Oscar, and especially with Rouben Mamoulian, to get her way. She would be paid a flat $1,500 for her work on the show—supplemented with a $50-a-week bonus after the opening—and eventually with a one-half percent royalty for all New York and major touring productions. But to the end of her life, she would remain bitter about what she viewed as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s greed. And in interviews and oral histories in her later years, she appeared to mischaracterize Hammerstein’s ideas about the show’s signature dance: a ballet at the end of the first act titled “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.” De Mille would insist that Hammerstein originally envisioned a circus-themed piece, whereas she injected the themes of dark sexuality and danger as Laurey is torn between the sunny Curly and the brooding Jud.
But before de Mille was even hired, Hammerstein had sketched out a fairly detailed scenario for the ballet. Oscar did envision having Aunt Eller appear as a circus rider in pink tights, with Curly driving a golden surrey. But after Laurey takes the “elixir of Egypt” that the peddler has sold her, Hammerstein imagined, she would fall into a trance and “a ballet is started which states, in terms of fantasy, the problems that beset Laurey. The treatment will be bizarre, imaginative and amusing, and never heavy.” His initial thought was that the dream figures could either be played by the actors who portrayed them in the rest of the show, or by separate dancers (de Mille would choose the second option).
In a later draft titled simply, “Prelude to Ballet,” a group of girls sing to Laurey as she repeats their chant: “I am a girl who knows what she wants and I can choose…” Then, Hammerstein wrote, “The wispy figure of a bride glides on from the shadows.” Laurey gazes ahead of her, entranced in her daydream, murmuring, “Yes, yes.” This is followed by a terse typewritten note: “Take it, Agnes!”
Take it de Mille did, devising a dream-turned-nightmare in which Laurey is attracted to Curly but irked at his cockiness, and is both repelled and intrigued by Jud. Curly and Laurey’s wedding is interrupted by a menacing Jud, who chases her into a saloon where the girls of his dirty postcards come to life, dancing a can-can and taunting her to a jangling rendition of “I Cain’t Say No.” Jud and Curly fight to the eerie strains of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” transposed into a minor key, and Curly is killed. Jud carries Laurey off in his arms, just as she awakens from the dream to find him standing over her, waiting to take her to the party as the first-act curtain falls.
In twelve or thirteen minutes, the ballet elaborates on the story and the characters in ways that would take pages of awkward exposition in dialogue. Here, too, de Mille was in charge. She repeatedly asked Rodgers for a score for the dances, and he replied, “You have the song tune, what more do you want?” So de Mille improvised, choosing themes from the score, which the rehearsal pianist would improvise, with Rodgers’s later approval. Years later, friends of Rodgers’s would explain that this was because the composer didn’t have the patience to sit in the rehearsal room with de Mille for hours at a clip. But at least in the beginning, he watched her closely.
“The first three days were absolutely crucial and Dick Rodgers sat right beside me,” she would recall decades later. “Right by the piano, watching every move. I couldn’t say, ‘Put your shoes on’ or ‘Button your shoes’ or ‘Turn your back,’ he was there watching. And the girls were so nervous, the dancing girls, that they really almost had fits, they were almost sick with nerves, and they said, ‘He’s watching us, he’s watching us.’ And I said, ‘My dears, he’s not watching you; he’s watching me. He’ll get around to you later.’ Well, at the end of the third day, we had done the postcard section and he came up to me and put his arms around me and said, ‘Where have you been all my life, Agnes?’ And I was in. I was accepted.”
Hammerstein was equally impressed.
“The ballets in Oklahoma! deal with the inner longings of the characters, with their roots, their environment, their reasons for being what they are,” he would explain years later in an essay for Dance magazine. “Here indeed the choreographer becomes the collaborator of the author and composer, not merely for the enhancement of one or two moments in the play but in helping to build the very bone and muscle of the story.”
* * *
REHEARSALS BEGAN ON February 8, 1943, in the Guild Theatre. The show’s working title was Away We Go, from an old square dance call. Decades later, George S. Irving, a young actor in the ensemble, would recall Rouben Mamoulian’s opening pep talk to the cast. “On the first day of rehearsal he pointed to the radiators attached to the wall and he made a very elaborate speech about how this was like a temple, beaming down at our efforts,” Irving remembered. “I was twenty years old. I didn’t know from nothing. I was so happy to be working.”
Mamoulian and Hammerstein generally worked with the actors on the main stage, while Rodgers, de Mille, and the conductor Jay Blackton drilled the singers and dancers in a downstairs lobby lounge. “It was like being in a cement mixer,” de Mille would recall. Tensions between her and Mamoulian were “shatteringly bad.” The rehearsal setbacks may have been typical, but it was already becoming clear that the new show was not. “You know, we had no real chorus kids,” Betty Garde would recall. “They were all from Juilliard. The singers were from Curtis in Philadelphia and Agnes de Mille’s dancers and other ballet schools. They were fresh.” At one point, the stage manager, Jerry Whyte, was thinking of quitting. Betty Garde urged him to stay with it. “This is going to run five years on Broadway,” she insisted.
In those days, it was standard procedure for Broadway-bound plays to go on the road for out-of-town tryout performances, where live (and perhaps less jaded) audiences could provide a test of what worked and what didn’t—and where scenes could be rewritten or restaged to address problems. The Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, was a favorite first stop, and the new show’s opening there was set for Thursday, March 11, a “split-week” run of just three performances. The cast had finished its final dress rehearsal at five o’clock that morning without ever making it through the second act. That night, Betty Garde would remember, “We had to go on cold with the second act and just grope our way around stage. It was unbelievable.”
In her dressing room at the Shubert, Celeste Holm was besieged with last-minute instructions from the producers. First was Lawrence Langner. “Just remember the Chaplinesque quality of the part,” he said. “The fact that she can’t say no is, to her, a tragedy.” Then came Terry Helburn, exhorting, “Up, up, up! We’re counting on you for the comedy so lift every scene you’re in!” And finally Armina Marshall, Langner’s wife and also a Theatre Guild official, with these
words of encouragement: “I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I think you’re absolutely wrong for the part, but good luck.” “Thus fortified,” Holm recalled, “I went upstairs and realized it was going to be between me and the audience.”
She needn’t have worried. Her comic solo, in which Ado Annie laments
When a person tries to kiss a girl
I know she orta give his face a smack.
But as soon as someone kisses me
I somehow sorta wanta kiss him back!
stopped the show cold. Days later, as the company decamped for Boston, Oscar devised new lines for the needed encore.
Over the years, the canard has grown up that the show was in serious trouble at this point. It is true that the Broadway producer Mike Todd told anyone who would listen at the New Haven opening that he didn’t see how the play could succeed, and he left at intermission—but, he later explained, only because he had to bail a friend out of jail. Still, the Guild’s backers were skeptical. Max Gordon, for one, was nervous enough to off-load $2,500 of his $15,000 share to Al Greenstone, who for years had printed the souvenir programs for the Guild and loved the show. Greenstone would not only reap many times his investment; he was so grateful that he sent checks back to the Guild in thanks for the privilege of being in on the ground floor.
There were rumors that Mamoulian might be sacked. On Saturday, two days after the opening, Alfred Drake spotted George Abbott in the theater in New Haven and asked if he’d come to take over. Why? Abbott wondered. The show was fine. What’s more, audiences liked it from the start—and so, contrary to legend, did the critics. The New Haven Register pronounced it “a rollicking musical … jammed to the hilt with tuneful melodies … ideal escapist entertainment.” At one midnight postshow story conference, Richard Rodgers interrupted his fretting colleagues. “Do you know what I think is wrong?” he asked. “Almost nothing. Now, why don’t you all quiet down.”
Still, Mamoulian would remember that when the show pulled into Boston for a two-week run, the producers were hardly on speaking terms with their director, regarding him as an obstinate obstacle. The Boston opening was Monday, March 15, and one scenic change ordered by Mamoulian backfired: he’d commissioned a flock of pigeons to lend outdoorsy verisimilitude, but they flew straight to the rafters, where they stayed for the rest of the run. There would be other, more important changes over the next two weeks. “Boys and Girls Like You and Me,” a tender but slow-paced second-act duet for Laurey and Curly, was dropped in favor of an exuberant reprise of “People Will Say We’re in Love,” with the lovers declaring, “Let people say we’re in love.”
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