Rodgers and Hammerstein: A Revolutionary Collaboration
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II are widely regarded as the duo that shaped American musical theater. After they first teamed up in 1943 on the smash-hit Oklahoma!, they produced a long series of successes including Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific and The Sound of Music. Both men enjoyed previous good fortune with different partners; Rodgers was paired with Lorenz Hart on Babes in Arms and The Girlfriend, while Hammerstein partnered with Jerome Kern on Showboat. But in 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein, independent of one another, became interested in Green Grow the Lilacs, a play by Lynn Riggs about a young farmer's daughter in love with a cowboy in the turn-of-the-century Oklahoma territory. When their respective partners were disinterested in the project, Rodgers and Hammerstein found one another and penned Oklahoma!, which opened on Broadway in 1943 and ran for 5 years and 2,212 performances, far exceeding the record of any previous musical or play. The collaboration was fortuitous, as the team went on to write 10 more hit musicals, and to win a grand total of thirty-four Tonys, fifteen Academy Awards, two Pulitzers, two Grammys and two Emmys. Their final work together was the well-loved The Sound of Music, which ran for 1,443 performances, addressing the political issues of musical censorship and bigotry in Nazi Germany.
Beyond tackling atypical subject matter, the duo's musicals changed theater in several important ways. Their musicals were more plot-driven than previous Broadway shows: each aspect of the musical form, including song, dance, and spectacle contributed to and furthered the plot. Most musicals before Rodgers and Hammerstein used these elements as a diversion, or intermission of sorts, from the actual story. Additionally, before the team began writing, many musicals were based around the star - an "actor who could sing." Rodgers and Hammerstein sought "singers who could act," placing the emphasis on musicality more than celebrity.
Another departure from precedent was to work on a song beginning with the lyrics. In previous partnerships, the men had started with music, but on Oklahoma!, Hammerstein wrote lyrics first and then Rodgers added the tunes. This "backwards" form of song-writing ensured that the songs remained connected to the story, further aided by Hammerstein's frequent role as author of the book; the songs were simply an extension of the dialogue. This is seen most clearly in Carousel, their second, and purportedly favorite musical. The idea of extended dialogue throughout a musical number is illustrated in the famous "Soliloquy" sequence, in which Billy Bigelow meditates upon the bleak future of his child-to-be. The thematic darkness introduced in Oklahoma! and developed in Carousel was another stylistic innovation introduced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. They used emotional empathy to pull the audience in, and did not shy away from complex, less-than-happy endings.
Rodgers and Hammerstein also deserve credit for bringing to musical theater the idea that stories onstage could occur in distant physical and historical contexts. The majority of their collaborations were set in a time and place far away from New York in the mid-1940s. However, the emotional accessibility of the characters and their common problems made these tales enjoyable and accessible to an American audience.