Something Wonderful
Page 45
Twain, Mark
20th Century Fox
“Twin Soliloquies”
Two by Two
critics on
written
Tyler, Judy
Tynan, Kenneth
Ullmann, Liv
Umeki, Miyoshi
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe)
“Under the Southern Cross”
United American Spanish Aid Committee
United Negro College Fund
U.S. Navy, Distinguished Public Service Award
U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security
U.S. Supreme Court
Universal Pictures
University Players
Up Stage and Down
Valentino, Rudolph
Valiant Years, The (documentary)
Van Druten, John
Van Heusen, James
Van Horne, Harriet
Variety
Varsity Show
“Venus”
Verrett, Shirley
Very Good Eddie
Very Warm for May
Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Victory at Sea (documentary)
awards
Rodgers score
Vidor, King
Viennese Nights (film)
Vietnam War
Voice of the Turtle, The (Van Druten)
Voight, Jon
von Trapp, Georg von
von Trapp, Maria Augusta von
Wagner, Richard
Wagner, Robert F.
“Waiting”
“Wake Up, Little Theater”
Walker, Don
Wallach, Eli
Walston, Ray
“Waltz for a Ball”
Warner, Jack
Warner Bros.
War Production Board
Warren, Harry
Warren, Leslie
Warrior’s Husband, The (Thompson)
Wasner, Franz
Wasserman, Herman
Wasserman, Lew
Watanabe, Eleanor “Doodie”
Watanabe, Jennifer Blanchard
Watanabe, Jerry
Watch on the Rhine (Hellman)
Watts, Richard, Jr.
“Way You Look Tonight, The”
Weaver, Sylvester “Pat”
Weill, Kurt
Weingart Institute
“We Kiss in a Shadow”
Welcome House agency
“Western People Funny”
West Side Story (film)
West Side Story (musical)
“What’s the Use of Wondrin’?”
“When You’re Driving Through the Moonlight”
“Where or When”
Where’s Charley?
White, Miles
“White Christmas”
“Who”
“Why, Why, Why”
Whyte, Jerry
Wickes, Mary
Wilder, Alec
Wilder, Billy
Wilder, Thornton
Wildflower
Wild Rose, The
Wild West Show
Wilk, Max
William Morris Agency
Williams, Emlyn
Williams, Molly
Williams, Tennessee
Williamson, Nicol
Williamson Music
Winchell, Walter
Winkle Town
Winnie the Pooh (film)
Winninger, Charls
Winters, Shelley
Wise, Robert
Wizard of Oz, The (film)
Wodehouse, P. G.
“Wonderful Guy, A”
Wonderful Town
Wood, Grant
Woodward, Joanne
Woollcott, Alexander
Words and Music
World Federalist Movement
World of Suzie Wong, The (Osborn)
World War I
World War II
Wright, Martha
Writers Board for World Government
Writers’ War Board
Wyler, William
Wynn, Ed
Yellen, Sherman
“Yesterday”
“You Are Never Away”
“You Can’t Get a Feller with a Gun”
You’d Be Surprised
You’ll Never Know
“You’ll Never Walk Alone”
“Younger Than Springtime”
You’re in Love
Zanuck, Darryl
Zanuck, Richard
Ziegfeld, Florenz
Ziegfeld Follies
Zinnemann, Fred
Zinsser, William
Oscar Hammerstein II was born into the theater, the son and grandson of producers. As a young man, he learned every facet of the trade: office boy, play reader, stage manager, author, and producer.
Asked what he had done before he became a composer, Richard Rodgers once replied, “I was a baby.” Raised in a passionately musical family, he was something of a prodigy and was composing by age nine.
Hammerstein’s most important early collaborator was Jerome Kern (right), the quintessential American composer of popular music whose elegant, infectious melodies made European operettas sound antique.
Teaming up with the lyricist Lorenz Hart (left), Rodgers would recall, he “acquired in a single afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend and a source of permanent irritation.”
Oklahoma! (1943) was the first musical to fully integrate song, story, and dance in the service of a realistic narrative and character development, revolutionizing the Broadway theater forever.
The sung dialogue of the “Bench Scene” in Carousel in 1945, with Jan Clayton and John Raitt, was the single most important moment in the development of the modern musical theater, in Stephen Sondheim’s view.
Agnes de Mille, the pioneering choreographer, brought the disciplined technique and narrative power of classical ballet to Broadway in the 1940s.
Robert Russell Bennett, the leading orchestrator of Broadway musical scores, was crucially responsible for creating what became known as the Rodgers and Hammerstein sound.
Before opening in New York, Broadway musicals had weeks of tryouts in New England. This photo of Rodgers and Hammerstein was taken in Boston’s Public Garden during the tryouts for Allegro in 1947.
In Allegro, an experimental show without big-name stars or standout song hits, the newcomer Lisa Kirk made a sensational splash as a long-suffering nurse, singing “The Gentleman Is a Dope” about her distracted boss, an ambitious doctor.
Oscar Hammerstein’s writing habits were as disciplined as Larry Hart’s had been chaotic. He is seen here working in a favorite chair in his farmhouse study in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Rodgers and his wife, Dorothy, were both ambitious and competitive, but they did not encourage the musical interests and talents of their teenage daughters, Linda (far left) and Mary.
Irving Berlin (center), the past master of American popular song, was recruited to write the music and lyrics for Annie Get Your Gun, the hit musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein produced in 1946.
Howard Reinheimer was the principal architect of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s wildly successful business and legal strategy.
Jo Mielziner, peering through a scenic design on glass, was a genius who could draw freehand sketches of proposed sets to scale, and deployed cinematic techniques for scene changes in Allegro and South Pacific.
Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin (above) brought romance and a frank approach to racial tension to South Pacific; director Joshua Logan co-wrote the script with Hammerstein, but the original 1949 poster shows his reduced billing.
Joshua Logan, brilliant, mercurial, manic-depressive, was among the most successful Broadway directors of his day and a frequent (if sometimes frustrated) collaborator with Rodgers and Hammerstein.
The German-born arranger and composer Trude Rittmann devised dance music, scenic underscoring, and unforgettable vocal and choral arrangements for Richard Rodgers, often wi
thout receiving full credit for her contributions.
Highland Farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, was Oscar Hammerstein’s principal workplace and emotional refuge for the last two decades of his life. Here is where he wrote lyrics for almost all his collaborations with Richard Rodgers.
The partners and their parallel wives, “the two Dorothys”—Dorothy Hammerstein (center left) and Dorothy Rodgers (center right)—on a visit to Oklahoma in 1946.
Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner in The King and I in 1951. They never so much as kissed but shared the sexiest polka ever danced.
Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones starred in the film version of Oklahoma! in 1955, together with Charlotte Greenwood (right), who had been the original choice to play Aunt Eller on Broadway but was unavailable in 1943.
Isabel Bigley (left) and Joan McCracken shared the spotlight in Me and Juliet, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1953 backstage tale about life in a Broadway musical. It proved a big disappointment.
The original poster for Pipe Dream, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s only out-and-out critical and commercial flop. The show about John Steinbeck’s raffish denizens of Cannery Row opened in 1955, and the partners lost their entire investment.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, an original musical for television in 1957, was the most-watched live broadcast in history to that point. Julie Andrews (center) played the title role even as she was starring on Broadway in My Fair Lady. Here she is seen with stepsisters Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley (left) and stepmother Ilka Chase.
Director Gene Kelly (front right, in cap) joins Rodgers and Hammerstein to watch a parade of costume tests for Flower Drum Song in 1958. The costume designer Irene Sharaff is at center, and the cast is visible in the mirror at rear.
Mary Martin (left) was nearing age forty-six when she starred in The Sound of Music, but onstage she could seem as bubbly and youthful as the seven von Trapp children she taught to sing eight times a week.
Rodgers and Hammerstein in a reflective pose, nearing the end of their collaboration.
Rodgers’s collaboration with Stephen Sondheim (right) on Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965 started pleasantly enough but soon turned sour over creative and personal differences.
A radiant Julie Andrews (center), charming children, and gorgeous Austrian scenery brought the screen version of The Sound of Music thrillingly to life and made it a box-office champion.
For nearly twenty years after Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers, seen here with Dorothy at a gala in 1972, soldiered on. But he never again achieved the same degree of critical or commercial success.
Cinderella finally made it to Broadway in 2013, starring Laura Osnes and Santino Fontana, proving that fifty-six years after its debut, impossible things were still happening every day.
ALSO BY TODD S. PURDUM
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964
A Time of Our Choosing: America’s War in Iraq (with the staff of The New York Times)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TODD S. PURDUM is the author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come and A Time of Our Choosing. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a senior writer at Politico, having previously worked at The New York Times for more than twenty years, where he served as White House correspondent, diplomatic correspondent, and Los Angeles bureau chief. A graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Dee Dee Myers, and their two children, Kate and Stephen. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue: All They Cared About Was the Show
1. The Sentimentalist
2. A Quality of Yearning
3. Away We Go
4. Bustin’ Out
5. So Far
6. Enchanted Evening
7. Parallel Wives
8. Catastrophic Success
9. Beyond Broadway
10. Auf Wiedersehen
11. Walking Alone
Epilogue: Bloom and Grow Forever
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Photos
Also by Todd S. Purdum
About the Author
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the use of the following materials.
Excerpts from lyrics of:
Oklahoma! – Copyright © 1943 by Williamson Music Co.
“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’”
“People Will Say We’re in Love”
“The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”
“Oklahoma”
“The Farmer and the Cowman”
“Lonely Room”
“I Cain’t Say No”
“Many a New Day”
“Someone Will Teach You” (Early Draft)
Carmen Jones – Copyright © 1943 by Hammerstein Properties LLC.
“Dat’s Love”
State Fair – Copyright © 1945 by Williamson Music Co.
“Our State Fair”
“It Might As Well Be Spring”
Carousel – Copyright © 1945 by Williamson Music Co.
“If I Loved You”
“The Bench Scene”
“A Real Nice Clambake”
“June Is Busting Out All Over”
“You’ll Never Walk Alone”
“What’s the Use of Wondrin’?”
Allegro – Copyright © 1947 by Williamson Music Co.
“Opening (Joseph Taylor, Junior)”
“A Darn Nice Campus”
South Pacific – Copyright © 1949 by Williamson Music Co.
“Twin Soliloquies”
“Bali Ha’i”
“Honey Bun”
“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”
“Some Enchanted Evening”
“Happy Talk”
“Younger Than Springtime”
“This Nearly Was Mine”
“Now Is the Time” (Cut)
“Suddenly Lovely” (Cut)
“My Friend” (Cut)
“Suddenly Lucky” (Cut)
The King and I – Copyright © 1951 by Williamson Music Co.
“Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?”
“A Puzzlement”
“Hello, Young Lovers”
“We Kiss in a Shadow”
“Something Wonderful”
“Getting to Know You”
“Western People Funny”
“Song of the King”
“Shall We Dance?”
Me and Juliet – Copyright © 1953 by Williamson Music Co.
“Opening of Me and Juliet”
“No Other Love”
“The Big Black Giant”
“Intermission Talk”
Pipe Dream – Copyright © 1955 by Williamson Music Co.
“All Kinds of People”
“Everybody’s Got a Home but Me”
“The Happiest House on the Block”
Cinderella – Copyright © 1957 by Williamson Music Co.
“In My Own Little Corner”
“The Prince Is Giving a Ball”
“Impossible”
Flower Drum Song – Copyright © 1958 by Williamson Music Co.
“Chop Suey”
“I Am Going to Like It Here”
The Sound of Music – Copyright ©
1959 by Williamson Music Co.
“The Sound of Music”
“Do-Re-Mi”
“My Favorite Things”
“Sixteen Going on Seventeen (Reprise)”
“So Long, Farewell”
“Edelweiss”
International Copyright Secured.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Reprinted by Permission.
Excerpts of libretti:
Libretto from Carousel by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Copyright © 1945 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
Libretto from South Pacific by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan.
Copyright © 1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
Libretto from The King and I by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Copyright © 1951 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
Libretto from Pipe Dream by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Copyright © 1955 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
Excerpts from lyrics of additional songs:
“Someone Will Teach You” Copyright © 2008 Hammerstein Properties LLC.
“Now Is the Time” Copyright © 1949 Hammerstein Properties LLC.
“Suddenly Lovely” Copyright © 1994 Hammerstein Properties LLC.
“My Friend” Copyright © 2008 Hammerstein Properties LLC.