Ramblings on libraries and life upon the wicked stage

It seems to me that Rodgers and Hammerstein are rather under-rated these days.  People tend to pass their shows off as trite, dated, old-fashioned or twee.  Well, either that or assume they wrote everything from Anything Goes to Fiddler on the Roof, and only gave up when Andrew Lloyd Webber came on the scene and wrote all the new shows.  Both views are, in my considered opinion, absolute rubbish.

The second is the easiest to refute.  They were responsible for some of the world’s most famous musicals, but they weren’t quite as prolific as some people assume.  Before they teamed up, each of them had a successful career, contributing to such gems as Show Boat and Pal Joey, and they were also successful producers, enabling other people’s shows (including Annie Get Your Gun) to reach the Broadway stage.  But in their period of collaboration (fifteen or so years), they wrote only eleven musicals.  First there are the big five, which everyone knows and which amateur societies recycle endlessly – Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music.  Then the two screen musicals – State Fair for Hollywood and Cinderella for the television.  And finally the less well-known stage shows – Allegro, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream and Flower Drum Song.  At some point, I plan to post about some of the obscure ones in more detail, but it’s quite obvious that their body of work, while very impressive, is not quite so all-encompassing as people often assume.

The more important misapprehension about Rodgers and Hammerstein is the first one, that their shows are past their sell-by-date, old-fashioned and irrelevant.  Any show is only as good as the productions of it that people have seen, so I suppose that a number of very bad productions may have given rise to this point of view, but I’m afraid it just seems absurd to me.  Just looking at the music, a lot of it still has immense power.  The opening Waltz in Carousel is one of the most glorious pieces of instrumental music written for the theatre, ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’ from State Fair is a perfect little song that truly deserved its Oscar, and South Pacific‘s rousing ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’ has an undeniable power which drags singers and hearers along on a way of joy and excitement.  And there’s much more.  The score of Carousel is one of the most incredible written for theatre in my opinion, and many of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs are incredibly well-known outside of their original context.  ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’, ‘Edelweiss’, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ are so much a part of life in Western society that it’s hard to imagine a time before they existed.

However, songs are only a part of the equation in musical theatre.  A very important part, but not to the exclusion of the other elements.  And Oscar Hammerstein was actually a rather good dramatist, creating characters who were interesting and flawed.  Curly’s attitude to Jud in Oklahoma! is reprehensible, and Billy from Carousel is hardly a great role model, yet we understand and sympathise with these characters.  The shows also deal with issues of class, racism, societal pressure and the like.  South Pacific, particularly, has a very strong anti-racism theme which is brought out most strongly in Joe Cable’s rant ‘You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught’.  There’s a reason that show won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, I think.  However, there’s also a very good reason why The King and I was banned in Thailand, and some aspects of that script are a tad embarrassing.

Hollywood must bear some of the blame for the image of Rodgers and Hammerstein as being sickly-sweet and sentimental, largely due to The Sound of Music.  The film of this, the last R&H show, is far more saccharine than the stage version, which has a stronger take of the theme of conforming (or not) to what society expects of us.  And State Fair is a load a hokum.  Great fun, but very little weight.

There may be some truth in the assumptions which people make about Rodgers and Hammerstein, but for me the music and scripts of their shows stand up to modern scrutiny far better than the majority of their contemporaries.  Complex characters, serious themes, songs which everyone from granny to grandchild knows, a Pulitzer prize.  All of these contribute to my belief that they have been under-rated.  Some musical theatre historians would go as far as to say that they invented the ‘integrated’ musical with Oklahoma!, the sort of musical where script, songs and dance all combine in a unity, to forward the story, where song and dance do more than decorate the plot, and where plot does more than serve as an excuse for musical numbers.  I don’t believe this is true, but I do believe they helped to popularise this style, and made it the norm rather than the exception.  Their contribution to musical theatre history (and indeed popular music history, given the number of people who recorded their songs) should be undeniable.  I, for one, feel that they have been underrated, and I both hope and believe that their shows and songs will still be going strong when I’m too old to belt out ‘If I Loved You’.  Surely the hills will always be alive with the sound of their music.