“The Beamish Ones,” they were dubbed by Boris Karloff. Howard Lindsay (left) and Russel Crouse, two of Broadway’s most revered and respected craftsmen, producers, and pranksters.
Here, they compare notes during the Boston tryout.
To everyone on Broadway, they were known as “Dick and Oscar,” the millions of fans around the world knew them as Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Hayward thought it was a great idea and happily agreed to co-produce the show. He dispatched his lawyer to Munich to secure the rights, but it took six trips across the Atlantic before a deal could be signed. In a gesture of generosity rare for Broadway producers, Hayward gave Maria von Trapp a small percentage— three-eighths of one percent—of the eventual royalties. With the rights successfully secured, Hayward turned to his next creative challenge: figuring out who would write the show. At this point, he envisioned the stage version as a straight play with occasional songs from the Trapp’s own repertoire.
Hayward’s choice for the script were two gentlemen who had been Broadway fixtures for nearly a quarter of a century: Howard Lindsay and Russel “Buck” Crouse. In 1934, Lindsay, a director and actor, had been handed the plum assignment of staging the latest Cole Porter musical, a shipboard escapade starring Ethel Merman. The original book was such a mess that the producer begged Lindsay to take it over. Lindsay himself was overwhelmed and turned to Crouse, then a press agent for the Theater Guild. Friends had recommended Crouse as one smart cookie, which was what the musical—eventually called Anything Goes—needed. Lindsay and Crouse conducted a major rewrite and turned the incipient disaster into one of the great hits of the 1930s.
Lindsay and Crouse continued their partnership, writing a series of musical-comedy librettos, such as Red, Hot and Blue and Call Me Madam, or pertinent political plays, such as State of the Union (which won them the Pulitzer Prize). Lindsay and Crouse became savvy producers as well, with two of the biggest smashhit comedies of the 1940s: Life With Father (which they also wrote and in which Lindsay starred) and Arsenic and Old Lace (for which they provided major rewriting). In addition, they became beloved along Broadway as first-class pranksters and practical jokers. No one wrote funnier opening-night telegrams than Lindsay and Crouse. Crouse’s wife-to-be, Anna, described them thus in a 1941 piece for the Herald Tribune:
They couldn’t be more unalike. For instance, Lindsay answers all his mail, including insurance and haberdashery advertisements. Crouse answers nothing, leaves everything on his desk, except for precious odds and ends which he files in his pockets. This file includes addresses, grocery bills, jottings on future plays and sometimes even a check for $20,000, which he has been carrying in his pocket for five months.
Lindsay and Crouse hardly seemed like natural choices for a devotional play about Austrian folksingers, but Hayward—also their agent— had known them for years and had produced several of their smash hits. He knew them to represent the pinnacle of Broadway craftsmanship. He even offered them two other projects: a musical version of Gone with the Wind, or a musical version of the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. (The latter, of course, went on to become the legendary Gypsy in other hands.) But Lindsay and Crouse far preferred the von Trapp family project.
As Lindsay and Crouse began assembling the material, Hayward felt that the traditional musical selections of the von Trapps should be augmented by some new Broadway material—and approached his old South Pacific colleagues Rodgers and Hammerstein. The songwriters liked the material, but competing with Mozart, Haydn, and Pergolesi was not their cup of tea. ‘“[That idea] seemed to me most impractical,” said Rodgers in a New York Times interview. “Either you do it authentically—all actual Trapp music—or you get a complete new score for it.” In any event, a new score from Rodgers and Hammerstein would be a long time in coming—they were contracted to start on their next show, Flower Drum Song, which was scheduled to go into rehearsal by September 1958. “Then,” Rodgers continued, the producers and Lindsay and Crouse said ‘“the most flattering thing in the world—‘If you and Oscar will write the music and lyrics, we will wait.’ ”
And so they did. This respite gave Lindsay and Crouse nearly a year to break down the epic saga of the Trapp family’s wanderings into something manageable for the musical stage. They made the decision to begin their story at Nonnberg Abbey, where Maria, with her tomboyish ebullience, is quickly revealed to be an impossible fit for the novitiate. Interestingly, the story concluded not back at Nonnberg Abbey with the departure of the von Trapp family to America, but in America itself, at the detention center on Ellis Island. Lindsay and Crouse had highlighted the show-business aspect of the tale, introducing a fictional American concert manager for the von Trapps, who gets the immigration authorities on Ellis Island to release Maria after they hear how wonderfully she can sing. It is not the promise of America, but rather, the promise of an American stage debut, that provided the dramatic climax for the initial draft of the show.
The real Maria and her first interpreter. Prior to the show’s going into rehearsal in the fall of 1959, Mary Martin spent two weeks in Vermont with her role model.
“I WAS BORN IN TEXAS AND SHE WAS BORN IN AUSTRIA, BUT UNDERNEATH, WE WERE THE SAME MARIA.”
MARY MARTIN
A miraculously prescient songlist: Typically, Rodgers and Hammerstein would work out the placement of the songs in the show’s dramatic structure before they started crafting the actual songs. Although only ‘The Sound of Music’ retains its original title (and the ‘dummy’ titles are awfully clunky), the songwriting team came very close to marking out the eventual score to the finished show in this early outline.
Lindsay and Crouse hewed essentially to the dramatic arc of Maria’s memoirs, but the stage requires a certain condensation and conflation with any large narrative. The Captain and Maria marry each other late in the dramatic version, and their honeymoon is depicted as nearly simultaneous with the beginning of the Anschluss. In reality, of course, those two events were more than a decade apart. Within those years, the major events of the von Trapp family revolved around the birth of Rosemarie and Eleonore; once those years were conflated, the two girls (and by extension, Johannes) vanished with them. In what was surely a greater affront to the von Trapp children than to Austrian history, however, all of the children’s names were changed (into rather operetta-like names), as well as their ages and their sexes. Also, for the record, Maria Kutschera herself is renamed—in the show she becomes Maria Rainer, perhaps in a tribute to the Austrian-trained movie actress Luise Rainer.
This was the general tenor of the material in early spring 1959, when Rodgers and Hammerstein received the onion-skin manuscript of “Trapp Family,” as it was then called, from Lindsay and Crouse—their third draft of the material. The next task was for the four collaborators to break down the narrative and transform key text passages into songs that could heighten the story and allow it to achieve its maximum dramatic potential. Lindsay and Crouse met constantly with the songwriters, and planned every turn of the musical narrative in collaboration with them. There were no songwriters better at this than Rodgers and Hammerstein, who took dialogue from Lindsay and Crouse and recast it as songs (“Maria”), and when Lindsay and Crouse came to them with problems in streamlining the story, Rodgers and Hammerstein were able to craft songs to move the narrative along. For example, in Act Two, Lindsay and Crouse needed an emotional shift in the story when the Captain sets aside his affections for Elsa—who has broken off their engagement—and then admits his love for Maria, Rodgers and Hammerstein provided “An Ordinary Couple,” a romantic duet that neatly provided the perfect resolution to a dramatically efficient and effective scene. First, however, Rodgers and Hammerstein worked out the routine of the songs—the structure of how musical material would alternate between solos and group numbers, up-tempo songs and ballads—everything to create a satisfying harmony and balance in the show. An early tentative routine of songs in outline form shows how close Rodgers and Hammerstein got to the final form
of the show, acting only on intuition and talent.
Rodgers and Hammerstein did make one major structural change in Lindsay and Crouse’s second draft. Originally the intermission was to come after Scene Eight, where Maria sneaks off from the Captain’s party, guitar and satchel in hand, heartbroken but determined to return to the Abbey. Rodgers and Hammerstein wanted the Act One curtain to come down on a song they would write, preferably an uplifting one, so they asked Lindsay and Crouse to move the Act One curtain one scene later, after Maria returns to the Abbey and is given spiritual advice by the Mother Abbess. “You have to face life, wherever you are,” was the final line that Lindsay and Crouse typed for the Mother Abbess—but in their script, in blue ink, the merry pranksters scrawled underneath, “At this point she also has to face Rodgers and Hammerstein.”
Rodgers and Hammerstein were about to have some spiritual guidance of their own. Hammerstein began a correspondence with a friend of the Hallidays, Sister Gregory, a nun who served as head of the drama department at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. The sister became an unofficial technical advisor in Catholic matters and soon became a much-needed spiritual advisor as well. Sister Gregory’s inspirational letters fed Hammerstein’s expansive soul, and as the collaboration on The Sound of Music grew, his lyrics took on a quality that was more yearning, more compelling, and more spiritually challenging.
Rodgers, for his part, was introduced to Mother Morgan at the College of the Sacred Heart in Westchester County, New York. It was she who invited Rodgers to several concerts of Catholic liturgical music and was willing to answer any questions he might have about devotional hymns, Gregorian chants, polyphony and so on. This is the closest Rodgers ever got to musicological research for any project; his pure intuitive musicianship usually made the songs sound effortlessly like one-part Tin Pan Alley, one-part Oklahoman folk songs, or Siamese court music, or liturgical texts. But he was grateful for his informative visit to Sacred Heart. In fact, The Sound of Music contains some of his most effective pastiches; the “Laendler” folk dance that brings the Captain and Maria together for the first time, with its faint inversion of “The Lonely Goatherd,” sounds for all the world like a pure native Austrian tune. Rodgers was lucky in that his loyal vocal and dance arranger, Trude Rittman, was also a German émigré and could supply the proper grace notes to the score.
Richard Rodgers and his wife Dorothy attend a concert of religious music; it was to be a profitable research trip.
One last bit of advice came from someone with even more at stake. Maria von Trapp had read an early draft of the script and had three main concerns: she felt that the character of Maria was not enough of a tomboy and therefore did not undergo enough of a change; second, the Captain was far too Prussian and humorless than the real item. But most importantly, how could the creators possibly eliminate Father Wasner, the one person most responsible for the professional success of the Trapp Family Singers? Lindsay and Crouse had warned her early on that the show could contain either Father Wasner or Mary Martin, but not both— either a priest could teach the children to sing, or the star could. Most of Maria’s comments were astute, but Richard Halliday, perhaps wisely, did whatever he could to keep the headstrong matriarch back home in Vermont during rehearsals. There was one last thing that needed fixing: the title. Originally called Love Song, the show was changed to The Sound of Music when Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lawyer found dozens of copyrighted shows bearing the former title and begged them to use something less susceptible to a plagiarism lawsuit.
By the last week of August 1959—little more than half a year after the collaboration had begun—the show had been shaped enough to go into rehearsals. Casting had proceeded without incident. Martin, of course, would play Maria and participate in all major casting decisions. The producers and director, Vincent Donehue, sought New York’s most handsome leading men for the part of Captain von Trapp (including, rumour has it, a Canadian classical actor named Christopher Plummer who was deemed too young). Theodore Bikel was Viennese-born, and, in addition to his acting career, had an impressive sideline as a folksinger. When, after performing some more typical Broadway tunes, he brought his guitar and accompanied himself on a folk song, he sealed the deal with Martin immediately. “We don’t have to look anywhere else, do we?” she asked Rodgers. Rounding out the cast in two parts invented just for the show were Marion Marlowe as Elsa Schraeder, a worldly, aristocratic love interest for the Captain, and the everengaging character actor, Kurt Kasznar, as Max Detweiler, the cynical impresario who encourages the family to perform at the Salzburg Festival (although that was changed, too—perhaps for reasons of propriety—to the Kaltzberg Festival). On the production side of the team were scenic designer Oliver Smith, costumer Lucinda Ballard, and choreographer Joe Layton, who would be in charge of the many musical staging sequences involving the seven von Trapp children. In the category of “Only on Broadway,” Martin’s simple frocks and dresses would be created by the haute couture designer Mainbocher, who had transformed Martin into a goddess for One Touch of Venus in 1943. Everything seemed to be, as befits a show starring a submarine commander, shipshape.
Richard Rodgers plays the score to The Sound of Music to the cast and crew: Theodore Bikel listens, left of the composer and Oscar Hammerstein is to the far right.
But then, after the third week of rehearsal, Oscar Hammerstein went in for a routine physical with his physician and discovered he had cancer of the stomach. An operation was immediately scheduled for midSeptember. It was partially successful—the carcinoma had been removed, but so had most of his stomach. Hammerstein could still function, but he would miss both the final run-throughs in New York and the out-oftown engagement in New Haven, Connecticut, in early October. A showbiz trouper since his twenties, it would be the first time that the hands-on Hammerstein would miss the crucial rehearsals and tryouts of a new project. “We are going to work as long as we can,” said Rodgers, himself a cancer survivor, in an attempt to comfort Mary Martin, according to Max Wilk’s Overture and Finale. In a missive from Rosary College, Sister Gregory gently chided Hammerstein for “chickening out” of the New Haven tryout, but when the Hallidays soon told her the real reason for Hammerstein’s absence, she wrote Hammerstein and his wife a contrite letter: “It’s the worst possible time for Mr Hammerstein to be ‘benched’ . . . but seems to me that when we are working with others, as you two most certainly are, we must have a core of peace, a secret place within, a place strictly our own where we can retire to be refreshed, to think, and grow.” Lindsay and Crouse cabled to Hammerstein a more characteristic telegram from New Haven: “WE ARE SIXTY, GOING ON 70, YOU CAN DEPEND ON US. HOWARD AND BUCK.”
Mary Martin makes friends with the children on Oliver Smith’s two-tiered set.
Despite the absence of Hammerstein, the week-long New Haven tryout went without hitch on the creative front (although Patricia Neway as the Mother Abbess missed a few performances due to illness) and the show garnered the sort of acclaim that usually accompanied a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical at the Shubert Theater. Hammerstein was able to join the company halfway through the two-week Boston engagement and, although still recovering, he enthusiastically gave notes on the performance and the show. Very little needed to be fixed; it was the threat of the Anschluss and the appearance of the Nazis in the second act that most needed strengthening. Even in 1959, fifteen years after the end of the war, it was not that common to see Nazis on stage in a Broadway show. The Sound of Music was the first time that Nazis—in a serious incarnation—had ever appeared in a Broadway musical. Tact was required and the physical presence of Nazi officers was played down as the show was revised, utilizing more insinuation than brutality. “The end result,” said Rodgers to the New York Times, “is that there’s more menace without seeing them than there was on stage in those musical comedy uniforms—after all, who are we going to offend, people who like Nazis?”
Opening night at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater came on November 16,
1959. The show had cost $400,000—a not insignificant sum back then—but it also had an $2,320,000 advance sale, a record for its time. The opening of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was a biennial event, and still one of the most anticipated evenings on Broadway. Although most of the Boston reviews were raves, the astute local critic Elliot Norton had set the creative team on edge with his cavils about the show’s “silliness, stiffness and corny operetta falseness of the script.” Still, none of this mattered to the openingnight crowd in New York, who applauded mightily after the final curtain came down. When Mary Martin came forward to take her curtain call, a formidable gray-haired woman in a green satin dress stood up immediately and applauded. Martin was not shocked—the same woman had stood up at precisely the same moment during the opening nights in New Haven and Boston. Besides, Martin had sent her the green dress as an opening-night present. Mary Martin bowed, looked at the woman, and blew her a grateful kiss. Why shouldn’t she? After all, The Sound of Music was the story of the woman in the green dress. And, as the previous three hours made abundantly clear, one couldn’t tell Maria von Trapp what to do.
“When a Rodgers and Hammerstein show hit New Haven, it was always in pretty good shape,” said theater historian Max Wilk. Here is the program cover for the world premiere engagement of The Sound of Music.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
My day in the hills
Has come to an end, I know.
A star has come out
To tell me it’s time to go,
But deep in the dark-green shadows
Are voices that urge me to stay.
So I pause and I wait and I listen
For one more sound,
The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical Page 5
