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The first biographies of Golden Age theater composers tended to be American Masters-style valentines written by members of the family's outer circle. The results were pleasant but left much to be desired as serious engagements with their subjects. Meryle Secrest's life of Richard Rodgers, Somewhere for Me, represents the second generation of musical theater biographies. Now that the main players and their comrades are mostly deceased, these bios offer—albeit respectfully—the warts-and-all readers expect; they are charier of legends passed along the grapevine while still falling well short of real substance.
Rodgers was something of a late bloomer. He teamed up with lyricist Lorenz Hart in 1919, and the two banged around penning forgettable college productions for six years before finally making a hit with a smart benefit revue, The Garrick Gaieties of 1925. Rodgers had been on the verge of taking a job selling underwear, but after the success of this little show he and Hart never looked back. Through the late twenties they blessed Broadway with a succession of bonbons, hanging fine little songs on airy plots. After an uneven stint in Hollywood when work on Broadway dried up during the depths of the Depression, they entered into a halcyon period, producing scores bursting at the seams with some of the choicest songs Broadway had ever heard.
But as the years passed, Hart, a serious alcoholic, grew increasingly unreliable. Rodgers often had to trawl New York's bars in search of his gifted collaborator, sometimes resorting to writing lyrics himself. Finally, in the early forties, Rodgers was forced to jump ship to the seasoned and steady Oscar Hammerstein, and the result was a series of musicals tying song to story in a fashion only fitfully achieved on Broadway before. For we twenty-first-century sophisticates, Oklahoma! is that corny wheezer we have endured politely in high school auditoriums. We can't readily imagine the impact that it had on audiences at the time, so elated after "People Will Say We're in Love" that Joan Roberts had to come back onstage to take an extra bow.
For the next two decades, Rodgers and Hammerstein reigned as the deans of the Broadway musical. Today it is quaint to read conductor Lehmann Engel's The American Musical Theater of 1967, laying down the law that there would be far fewer unsuccessful musicals if writers simply adhered to various tenets derivable from the classic ones. Implicitly Engel treats Rodgers and Hammerstein's template as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk model, impressive in its own way as the Wagnerian synthesis of drama, music, and dance in a grand spectacle. For us, Pacific Overtures and Urinetown blow Engel's cozy assumptions sky-high, but how was he to know? In his era, Oklahoma! had been followed by its siblings Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I, all of which had long runs and tours, endless revivals, and were made into big fat movies, their songs becoming virtual folk music for a postwar America.
Secrest tells this story skillfully, yet she has only a yeoman's familiarity with Rodgers's music beyond the grand old standards familiar to most people of her generation. Whole musicals go by in a few sentences, with a handful of cast members and a couple of songs mentioned by name. An especial problem is the earlier shows that Rodgers wrote with Hart: just what was a musical like Heads Up! or America's Sweetheart like? Bringing these alive to the reader requires listening to old dance band medleys of songs from obscure scores, and poring over playbills, scripts, stills, and sheet music in libraries and archives.
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