DM: My thesis is mainly concerned with published texts and also primarily cast recordings, and so I thought Oklahoma! was a great case study for that, because, well thereʼs this myth that itʼs the first cast recording, but Iʼve read some material that says there were previous examples. Rather it was the most successful one that was recorded.
BP: There were a few earlier recordings. Porgy and Bess was recorded. In England Flora Dora recorded at the turn of the century. But Oklahoma! was the first cast album that made a difference, that the public noticed, because Oklahoma! itself was such a phenomenal success. Also, when Oklahoma! opened, and instantly became the success that it was, and got the great reviews that it did, and everyone was singing the music (and in those days the big singers would be under contract to the record companies) if a song came out the record company might assign to several different people it had under contract. Tommy Dorseyʼs band might record it, and Bing Crosby might record the same song; and thatʼs been going on in the recording industry for years. It doesnʼt really happen that much anymore because there arenʼt as many singers under record contracts.
In the days when the engine of Broadway was the composer, the composers
wrote scores that people wanted to hear. People wanted to buy the sheet music, buy the recordings. And the Broadway writers came (most of them, anyway) came to the theatre as songwriters, not as dramatists. Even though we think of
American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess when we think of Gershwin, he was first (and arguably, foremost) a songwriter, a tune smith, a Tin-Pan-Alley guy. Rodgers and Hammerstein changed the theater because what they wrote was so successful you couldnʼt ignore what they were doing. They werenʼt the only writers who wanted to fuse the story and the songs into a single element.
(Show Boat and Music in the Air already done a pretty good job of that.) But Oklahoma! integrated its elements so well and was such a phenomenal hit that suddenly the book musical was the direction in which everyone wanted to move.
Well, they may not have wanted to, but they did. Even Irving Berlin.
Now what happened is that in 1942 there was a musicianʼs strike in the
recording industry. Local 802 (the New York Musicianʼs Union) president, James Petrillo, wasnʼt allowing any recordings to be released when Oklahoma! opened.
So Oklahoma! went into the studio to be recorded, but the recording couldnʼt be released. There actually records released during that period with vocal backups instead of instrumental backups. Union musicians couldnʼt play on recordings while the strike lasted. So when Oklahoma! did hit the record stores, everybody in the country (and eventually, the world) was waiting for this record. So thatʼs the impact that the recording of Oklahoma!…
DM: That contributed to its success?
BP: Well it already was a huge success and the recording made it an even bigger one.
Imagine a show in which youʼre in love with the songs, but you canʼt buy a
recording. You wait for months and months, and in the meantime you hear the music being played on the radio, in band and orchestra concerts, in dance halls—
everywhere you go. But you canʼt buy a recording of it. Finally, the recording is released. When that happened to the recording of Oklahoma! it was like a gold rush. Everybody bought that record album. And when I say everybody I donʼt mean just the the Broadway afficionados. I mean people all over the country—our parents, our grandparents. Thatʼs when the Broadway show kind of became a part of the mainstream American culture, because the album of Oklahoma! allowed everyone to experience what, until that time, only the people who could get to New York could experience.
The original Broadway cast recording is not my particular favorite recording of Oklahoma!. Itʼs historical, but itʼs truncated. They actually recorded the cast album, and then, a few months later, recorded some additional songs that had not been included in the first recording session. (I believe that now, when you buy the CD of the original Broadway cast of Oklahoma! of the originally recorded and additionally recorded tracks are included.) Because, in those days, every track had to fit on the side of a 78, no track could be longer than three minutes. Today we may think of musicals as dramas operas. More and more we are getting recordings of shows from beginning to end. In the 1940ʼs however, the days of 78s, there was no thought of recording a whole show. It was the songs that mattered.
Especially the hit songs. It took a lot of clout to get Decca (the recording
company) to record a song like “Pore Jud is Daid,” but Oklahoma!ʼs success gave it that clout. Tommy Dorsey wasnʼt going to play that song, and no one was going to dance to it or sing it. But Oklahoma! was such a phenomenon they got to record
the character numbers, most unusual in an era when most musicals were driven by their hit tunes. When Anything Goes was recorded, back in 1930, they recorded only the big hit songs (“Anything Goes,” “I Get a Kick out of You,” and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.”) They didnʼt think about recording the character numbers or the comedy numbers. Oklahoma! changed that. And then, it changed the theater.
Because up until that point, people knew only the hits they heard on the radio. In those days, thatʼs how you heard music—you listened to the radio. And there were dance bands everywhere. Every hotel and even many restaurants had live orchestras, and dancing was big, and there were dance arrangements of all of these hit songs. And thatʼs really what plugged music all over, especially show music. And the people who wrote the shows wanted those song hits, even Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although Hammerstein was determined from the get-go (I mean heʼs the guy who wrote Show Boat) to engineer musicals that were not just collections of songs, but were real stories, and the songs drove the story forward.
Even though Rodgers and Hammerstein accomplished this, you have to keep in mind that they were still, at heart, songwriters.
Today, I donʼt know which, if any, of the new writers have taken the place of the writers in the Rodgers & Hammerstein era. Theyʼre all wonderful composers and lyricists – Michael John LaChiusa, Jason Robert Brown, Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon. Maybe in their hearts they would love to have a hit songs, but they are not sitting down to write a score for the sake of producing a batch of hit tunes. Even when Rodgers and Hammerstein were writing their most serious shows, they came from a songwriting world, and they lived in a publishing world.
In other words, music drove the shows. Thatʼs why in those days, the composer
was king. And there were big orchestras in the theatre orchestra pits, what the composer wanted, he got. The composer and his batch of hit tunes were the reason everybody was tuned into Broadway. Each new show was expected (yes,
expected!) to deliver hit songs, and when it did everybody involved shared in the success and the financial rewards of that show. Today, theatrical composers donʼt really rule the roost that way. Maybe Andrew Lloyd Weber does, but he has earned his success.
DM: And I think heʼs had success with writing hit tunes.
BP: Yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber has had wonderful success writing hit tunes. And this success puts him in a position of power. Last spring the entire sound system for Phantom of the Opera (at the Majestic Theater) was removed and replaced by a new one. Because Webber felt the old one was no longer loud enough (if itʼs possible to believe the sound system for Phantom of The Opera wasnʼt loud enough!). He understood that the audience wanted to have a rock concert experience in the theater, and he wanted to give it to them. Thatʼs what the clout of success can do. As a producer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, could give the audience the theater experience he wanted them to have. Itʼs why the original production of Carousel had a forty-piece orchestra and Phantom now has a new sound system.
DM: This is great, thank you. Do you mind if I start back at the beginning?
BP: No. Go back to your questions! Keep pulling me back on track.
DM: First of all, could you tell me a little bit about your work with Rodgers and Hammerstein, both the men and the organization.
BP: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein began working together in 1943 on
Oklahoma!. Up to that point both of them had had very successful careers with other collaborators—Hammerstein with operetta writers, like Sigmund Romberg, who wrote The New Moon and Jerome Kern, who not only wrote operettas, but was really kind of the father of modern musical theater. Certainly the person Richard Rodgers was listening to when he was young was Jerome Kern. With Show Boat, Kern really blossomed into American writers of something that was no longer operetta, it was a new totally American kind of musical theater.
In 1943, Rodgers had been working with Lorenz Hart for his entire career.
Hart, a wonderful lyric writer, had his demons. He was an alcoholic, he was a homosexual, he was five feet tall. He was an unhappy man. Itʼs too bad, because everyone loved him. When you go back and talk (well itʼs harder and harder to do this) to the people who knew him, they will tell you how much they loved him.
He was always said to have been an adorable man. Itʼs too bad, because this adorable man destroyed himself, and Rodgers got to the point where he couldnʼt work with him anymore. When it got to the point that Rodgers couldnʼt talk Hart into writing Oklahoma! Rodgers knew he was in serious trouble. Theatre Guild had offered him Green Grow the Lilacs, and he wanted to turn it into a musical.
But Lorenz Hart was adamant. He told Rodgers he didnʼt want to do it. So Rodgers went to Oscar Hammerstein, and Hammerstein (after expressing his concern about not wanting to take Hartʼs place unless it became absolutely
necessary) agreed to write the show with him. Hammerstein had had great success in the 1920s, but the 1930s were a bit of a dry spell for him. He wrote several lovely shows that, for one reason or another, didnʼt take off. Some of them were wonderful: for example, Music in the Air and Very Warm for May. Music in the
Air was a success with a couple of hit songs (“The Song is You” and “Iʼve Told Every Little Star”). Very Warm for May was a flop that had one absolutely great song, “All the Things You Are,” one of the finest of both Kernʼs and
Hammersteinʼs careers. But by 1943 Hammerstein wasnʼt really at the top of his game, still highly respected, but no longer enjoying the success in which Rodgers was basking. Still, Hammerstein was a towering figure. Whatever he had not published in the previous fifteen years, he had Show Boat. And itʼs hard not that suspect that Show Boat, or something akin to its Americanism and its emotional power was what Rodgers wanted, where he wanted to go. So Rodgers and Hammerstein agreed to go to work together.
Normally, the job of writing a musical is a collaboration of three people: the composer, the lyricist, and the book writer (the librettist). However, for
Oklahoma! R & H agreed that Hammerstein (as he had done for Show Boat) would write the lyrics and the libretto—librettist and the lyricist. That
collaboration might have made for a two thirds / one third split for the new team, but for whatever reason, and itʼs hard to know because we donʼt how R & H made the decision, they opted for a fifty/fifty split. What their contemporaries always said about them is that they went into a room, they made whatever decisions they had to make, they came out perfectly unified. And this bond gave them great strength. No one ever saw these men disagree. They must have had things to disagree about. As collaborators they must have taken opposite sides over songs and scenes and the things that you need to get into, to take a part and put back together in order to write a musical, but no one ever witnessed them as anything but totally in synch with each other. Their decision from the get-go was to enter
into a fifty/fifty partnership, one in which they would split the publishing, their billing, their royalties, everything, right down the middle. Then they created their own publishing company, Williamson (both of their fathers were named William), and from the beginning they were business equals. Even though Hammerstein was doing double duty as lyricist and librettist. And it is my personal belief that
Hammerstein entered into this agreement without too many qualms.
In every musical theater collaboration I can think of has usually been one alpha partner, or at least one alpha personality. To work together successfully the other partner/personality has to acknowledge this and learn to deal with it. In Lerner and Loeweʼs case, it was Lerner who sat at the steering wheel, even though both he and Loewe were controlling the vehicle. With E. Y. Harburg, it didnʼt matter who he worked with. Harburg was always the alpha guy. So was Richard Rodgers.
This is why I feel Harburg and Rodgers never could have worked together and why, even though they tried, Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner had to walk away from each other. As Josh Logan once said to me, “There is always only one presidential suite in any hotel. Rodgers always got it. Dorothy (Hammersteinʼs wife) may not have liked it, but Hammerstein kept quiet. He knew what he had with Rodgers, and he wasnʼt about to rock the boat.”
The Theatre Guild produced the first three shows Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote: Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro. Oklahoma! was giant and Carousel majestic. Allegro came up short. However, the Theatre Guild was counting on it to be the same kind of financial success as Oklahoma! and Carousel had been.
They needed it to be. Oklahoma! and Carousel become cash cows The Theatre Guild. These two hits paid for many of the Theatre Guild productions that lost
money. According to Dania Krupska, who was Agnes de Milleʼs assistant on Allegro, when they got to the Boston tryout and everybody realized the show was in trouble, Hammerstein believed he had finally figured out how to fix it. De Mille had come to him, she was both the director and choreographer of Allegro, and asked “Whatʼs the play about?” Hammerstein explained what he thought the play was about, and de Mille responded, “Well you havenʼt written that. What you just said to me, thatʼs not what I see here.” Hammerstein thought it over, figured out what he had to do, and asked Lawrence Langer, who ran the Theatre Guild, for another week in Boston to make the necessary changes. Langer agreed to the extra week and Hammerstein and Rodgers went in front of the company in Boston and said “Mr. Langer and the Theatre Guild have been good enough to give us more time here and weʼre going to fix this play. We know what we have to do.”
Now whatever happened, two days later, Langer reneged and the Allegro company was told “youʼre going to New York Sunday night.” He just couldnʼt hold off the New York opening any longer. The Theatre Guild in the 1920s and ʼ30s and ʼ40s produced Shakespeare all over the country, things like that. It cost them a fortune. They hardly ever made money, they were always poor. But with Oklahoma! and Carousel they had all this money coming in, and they were looking at Allegro to be the third cash cow. Langer just chickened out. According to Dania, he realized “I cannot delay this play opening in New York. Iʼve got all my big shot friends and clients waiting to go to opening night next week. We gotta come in.” Langer and the Theatre Guild forced the issue, and Rodgers and Hammerstein were furious. There was nothing they could do. The show opened in New York on schedule, and was not a success. Allegro was the last time anybody
else ever produced anything that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote.
Josh Logan, who directed and co-wrote South Pacific (the next show R&H wrote after Allegro), said he knew when he went into South Pacific it was going to be a hit, because Rodgers & Hammerstein were so angry about Allegro. He said “I knew theyʼd do whatever they had to do to make South Pacific the biggest hit they had ever had.” And up to that time it was. Although, Oklahoma!ʼs run would turn out to be 313 performances longer than South Pacificʼs.
So anyway, here they are, Rodgers and Hammerstein, at the top of their game
—a 50/50 partnership with no other producers involved to get in their way. There would eventually be other billed producers on R & H shows—Joseph Fields on Flower Drum Song and Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday on The Sound of Music—but Rodgers & Hammerstein were in complete control. They called the shots. And they owned everything, lock stock and barrel. They wouldnʼt even make a deal with Logan as you probably know that story.
In the early nineteen fifties, their lawyer, Howard Reinheimer, who had been Hammersteinʼs lawyer all the way back to his Show Boat days, said to them,
“Youʼve got to buy back Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro from the Theatre Guild.” (As producers of these three shows the Theater Guild still owned a percentage of them. Reinheimer was encouraging R & H to buy the Theatre Guildʼs share and become the complete owners of these three shows. At first R &
H didnʼt understand why. In those days the value of a show was in its Broadway run, its national tour, and its sale to the movies. Once you got that money, that was it. Basically the money faucet turned off. Stock and amateur revenue wasnʼt like it is today. And there werenʼt any video sales back then, or ring tones or the
kinds of synch rights that rule the music publishing world today. Once the
Broadway run was over, the national tour and the movie were history there was no longer much perceived income for a musical. Still, R & H paid over $800,000 in early 1950s to buy back Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro from the Theatre
Broadway run was over, the national tour and the movie were history there was no longer much perceived income for a musical. Still, R & H paid over $800,000 in early 1950s to buy back Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Allegro from the Theatre