Monday, August 23, 2010

This Day in Theater History (“Oklahoma” Lyricist Hammerstein Dies)


August 23, 1960—Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the libretto and lyrics for Show Boat, then refined the so-called “integrated musical” with composer Richard Rodgers in the most successful musical-theater collaboration of the last century, died of stomach cancer at age 65 at his home in Doylestown, Pa.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s astounding run from 1943 to 1959 resulted in shows that have been continually mounted somewhere in the world ever since: Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. And unlike their later rivals, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, they don't appear to have wanted to kill each other.

Over the years, however, critical opinion has come to favor Rodgers’ earlier collaboration with Lorenz Hart. Boiled down to its simplest terms, Hart has achieved this superiority through: a) the biting wit and sophistication of his lyrics, and b) the greater room for creative latitude afforded jazz musicians by the Rodgers and Hart songs.

Rodgers, having tired of the depressive, alcoholic Hart’s exasperating work habits, would have harrumphed at the comparison, but that would be expected, given Rodgers’ reputation as a theatrical martinet. “Who cares what the critics say?” he might have scoffed. “Oscar and I matter to the only ones who really count—the public.”

The person who might have done more to raise Hammerstein’s critical standing is, oddly enough, the man who has repeatedly acknowledged him not only as a mentor, but even, throughout his troubled youth, as a kind of surrogate father: Stephen Sondheim.

Several years after their own dismal collaboration, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Sondheim raised Rodgers’ hackles by declaring that Hammerstein was “a man of infinite soul and limited talent; Dick is a man of infinite talent and limited soul.” Yet the first half of that famous quote might not have been as sharp-edged as the second, it contained, for all its surface affection, just as much ambivalence. Sondheim sounds characteristically sorry-grateful for Hammerstein's gifts.

Sondheim elaborated on his feelings toward the man who, following the divorce of his parents, treated him as something close to a member of his own family in a lengthy interview with The New York Times’ Frank Rich a decade ago:

“Oscar's lyrics are often flat-out sentimental, lacking in irony, which is the favorite mode of expression of the latter part of the 20th century. And I happen to love irony. He had a limited range of imagery -- too many birds in his lyrics -- stuff that is metaphorically what we all feel, but because they've been overused so much, and often by him, they lack force.”

The creative force behind Sweeney Todd went on to hail Hammerstein as one who made his “big contribution to theater…as a theoretician, as a Peter Brook, as an innovator.” And what impressed Sondheim the most in this regard? Perhaps the greatest flop among all the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical comedies, Allegro.


Talking about irony...

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