South Pacific opens at Chichester Festival theatre this month and Carousel comes to the Open Air theatre in Regent’s Park in August. The musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein are always with us but what does their ubiquity tell us? Should they be seen as comforting box-office bankers or is there some pathfinding element in their work we have lost sight of?
The smart thing to say is that Rodgers was at his best in his earlier collaboration with the lyricist Lorenz Hart, writing shows such as The Boys from Syracuse and Pal Joey that are defiant, sexy and urban. It is a view fiercely articulated by David Hajdu in a 2002 article in the New York Review of Books: “Anyone tempted to dismiss Richard Rodgers’ work as theme-park Americana, children’s music or camp is likely thinking of the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein.”
The opposite point of view is just as strenuously argued by Mark Steyn in his 1997 book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, where he describes Carousel, Oklahoma! and South Pacific as “radical, revolutionary, trailblazing”. He also says “if Rodgers and Hammerstein seem conventional today, it is because they invented the conventions – especially the most important one: let the story dictate the tone”.
There is an element of truth in both arguments. Rodgers and Hammerstein started out as genuine pioneers of musical theatre; by the time we get to The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959) their work, for all its phenomenal popularity, has lost its edge and become self-plagiarising. It embodies, in a curious way, the values of Eisenhower’s America.
But it didn’t start out like this. All the reasons why Oklahoma! (1943) was a landmark in musical theatre have been well documented. There is the integration of music, story and dance; the way a folktale is imbued with passion; the joyous celebration of homeland. The instant reaction of producer Mike Todd to the musical – “No girls, no gags, no chance” [some sources have it as “no legs, no gags, no chance”] – now looks like one of the stupidest showbiz prophecies ever.
Oklahoma! also has one vital property of a classic in that it is open to re-interpretation. In the autumn of 2019 I caught an extraordinary revival by Daniel Fish at New York’s Circle in the Square. Nothing was as expected. The set was a small-town community centre where the audience ate chilli, that had been cooked on stage, during the interval; the music was provided by an onstage seven-piece band; the dream ballet was danced by a female soloist with shaved head and Ado Annie was unforgettably played by Ali Stroker as a man-crazy, rural Delilah in a wheelchair. The greatest shock came in the way the hero, Curly, was swiftly exonerated for the palpable murder of the villain, Jud Fry.
This was an America where justice was seen at its roughest, which seemed appropriate for the era of Donald Trump. Even if few British directors go as far as Fish, they frequently remind us that the best of Rodgers and Hammerstein is not pickled in aspic. For an example, one can take two different versions of Carousel (1945) which increasingly looks like the team’s masterwork. Rodgers famously jettisons an overture in favour of a carousel waltz which a friend of mine said had the swirling rhythms of Der Rosenkavalier. But this opening can be staged in multiple ways. In Nicholas Hytner’s 1992 production at the National the carousel was replaced by an evocation of a grim 19th-century New England mill where the heroine, Julie Jordan, was at work. In Jo Davies’s 2012 revival for Opera North the opening waltz was used to trace the growth of the hero, Billy Bigelow, from abused, vagrant boy into adult fairground barker.
This point is crucial because it immediately addressed the problem with the show: Julie’s seeming acceptance of domestic violence (“He’s your feller and you love him. There’s nothin’ more to say”). Davies, without entering a plea of diminished responsibility, suggested Billy’s violence had specific social origins and my colleague, Alfred Hickling, made an excellent point when he compared Billy to Britten’s Peter Grimes: another maladjusted individual, in a work also written in 1945, at odds with the community. For proof of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s willingness to experiment you only have to look at Billy’s Soliloquy in Carousel: a number that, musically and lyrically, catches sudden shifts in thought and that becomes a sophisticated expression of dramatic character.
South Pacific (1949) presents a slightly different problem. Individual songs, such as Some Enchanted Evening or Younger Than Springtime, are hauntingly melodic and stay in your head for a lifetime. But what Peter Conrad called the show’s “chirpy, postwar ebullience” gives it the flavour of a period piece. The eventual acceptance by the Little Rock heroine, Nellie Forbush, that her lover, a French emigre planter, has two mixed-race children, is a little too easy. And Steyn observes that the Wasp marine’s love for a Polynesian woman is never really put to the test because of his premature death.
I suspect the answer, as Trevor Nunn proved in his 2001 production at the National and Bartlett Sher in his 2011 Lincoln Center revival, is to highlight, rather than underplay, the show’s historical origins. In 1949 the idea of inter-racial marriage and willingness to become stepmother to Polynesian children would have seemed quite daring. And, as ever, Rodgers and Hammerstein are formally adventurous: as Dominic Symonds has pointed out, in an essay on Hammerstein’s influence on Sondheim, Some Enchanted Evening is heard four times in the show but on each occasion offers a different perspective on the ongoing relationship.
I would argue that Rodgers and Hammerstein, far from being camp, cosy or conservative, in their early musicals expanded the thematic territory of the genre and, on a purely technical level, were genuinely experimental. But, while they never lost their gift for writing great songs, I feel they ceased to be artistically progressive. The King and I will always get revived but whenever I see it, most recently in another Sher production that came to the London Palladium in 2018, I feel I am being asked to endorse the civilising influence of the west on the barbaric east.
Meanwhile Flower Drum Song (1958) is, I suspect, now beyond revival. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, it is about the conflict between those who have embraced Americanisation and those who have sternly resisted it. It is 60 years since I saw the show but my chief memory is of exotic chinoiserie and dubious cultural appropriation. In contrast The Sound of Music is perennially popular and I’ve had modest pleasure from occasional revivals. But, as Kenneth Tynan pointed out, the idea of a testy patriarch, surrounded by scads of children, gradually succumbing to the charms of a bright-eyed younger woman, is nothing but a straight replay of the situation in The King and I. Pre-empting Andrew Lloyd Webber, the final Rodgers and Hammerstein venture was a TV adaptation of Cinderella, subsequently staged, which was harmlessly pleasant without setting the world on fire.
But, whatever the final estimation of Rodgers and Hammerstein, one truth must be acknowledged: that they never deviated from their core belief that a score is more than a collection of individual songs. As Rodgers put it in his autobiography: “a score is, or should be, a cohesive entity whose words and music are believable expressions of the characters singing them.” It is that faith in the dramatic imperative of song that is their most significant legacy and one that has been inherited, in very different ways, by figures as diverse as Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.
In many respects, Rodgers and Hammerstein were an odd couple. As Sondheim, who worked with Rodgers and was mentored by Hammerstein, once said: “Oscar Hammerstein was a man of limited talent and infinite soul whereas Richard Rodgers was a man of infinite talent and limited soul.” Maybe it was the fact that each supplied a quality lacking in the other that made them musical theatre’s most durable partnership since Gilbert and Sullivan.
South Pacific is at Chichester Festival theatre until 5 September. Carousel is at Regent’s Park open Air theatre, London, 31 July-25 September.
• This article was amended on 16 July 2021. Text was added to indicate that accounts differ as to the origin and exact words used in the phrase popularised as “no girls, no legs, no chance”.
