BOOKS

You needn't have Hart

Mark Steyn

RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN by Ethan Mordden Abrams, f30, pp. 224 There's a story of a Sound of Music pro- duction meeting where someone nervously wondered whether the show wasn't just a teensy bit controversial. 'You mean,' asked Richard Rodgers, 'it might upset people who like Nazis?' That's Rodgers and Ham- merstein for you: family entertainment, safe, undemanding, a sure thing for unadventurous touring managements, an easy vehicle for lazy stars (recently, Nureyev in The King and I), the sort of candy-coated schloch we'd have nothing else but without Government subsidy of the arts. Inaugurated by Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership celebrates its 50th anniversary this spring — but then their entire catalogue seems to have been designed for elderly couples to celebrate anniversaries. Look at these guys in every snapshot in the book: sober neckties, white pocket handkerchiefs, grey-suited, greyer-haired provincial Rotarians flanking Mary Martin or Gertrude Lawrence as if they're presenting a Sales Clerk of the Month award. You'll have to do better than that if you want to be interviewed on a BBC 2 arts show.

Oh, well. As they say on Broadway, nobody likes it but the public (the West End public, too: in recent years, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music and now Carousel have all returned). But, even on Broadway, showfolk don't love Rodgers and Hammerstein the way they love Rodgers and his first writing partner. Rodgers and Hart is sassy, cynical, metropolitan: 'We'll have Manhattan', and to hell with the world that lies beyond, `Way Out West On West End Avenue'. Rodgers and Hammerstein is either way out west or down east in Maine fishing vil- lages peopled by all those dumb clucks whose favourite things include whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and two-on- the-aisle for a junky Sound of Music tour starring someone who used to be in a sit- com: as an awed Mordden asks, 'Why would anyone even notice, much less relish, a kettle?' No wiseacre has to expend much effort demolishing R & H; it's all in the play: Oklahoma!? 'The corn is a high as an elephant's eye'. South Pacific? 'Corny as Kansas in August.'

Yet even to hurl the songs back scornful- ly is to acknowledge their potency. What other dramatists have planted their lines so solidly in our lives? Oscar Hammerstein, Mordden reminds us, invented the clichés of I'm In Love With A Wonderful Guy' (`high as a flag on the Fourth of July'): it's not his fault he did it so well that they've become clichés. His is an unobtrusive craft, an artless art: his first truly great song, '01' Man River', compresses the bitterness and resignation of an entire race into 24 lines and does it so naturally that most people think it's a genuine Negro spiritual, as opposed to a showtune cooked up in 1927 by two guys who needed something for a spot in the First Act; similarly, his very last song, 'Edelweiss', is invariably assumed to be a genuine Austrian folk tune. Imagine the same number written by Lorenz Hart, full of contrived musical-comedy triple- rhymes about giving your special fraulein some edelweiss so's you can put your arms around her and cradle vice. With Hart, as with Cole Porter, you hear the lyricist, not the character.

As his story develops, Mordden keeps coming back to the show that should have been the hit of that '43 season, Something for the Boys. Cole Porter songs, Ethel Mer- man starring and, as there has to be a plot, how about three guys from back east inher- iting property in Texas? (`Cue for gags: slickers in hickland.'):

`Just our bloody luck to be in here while crime is booming.' It was not an absurd mess; on the contrary, it was state-of-the-art. But it was not a pene- trating art. To hear the score by itself, one would not have the slightest idea what occurs in the story.

True, Porter did trouble himself to write a patter song for the burghers of San Anto- nio about famous Texans: 'Say, in a sweater/ Who looks better/ Than Missus Sheridan's Ann?' But again: you're looking at San Antonians, but you're hearing Porter's penthouse smarts.

It isn't about anything but the desire to entertain [observes Mordden]. However, that only looks weak today. In 1943, that was its strength.

By the time Hammerstein died in 1960, he and Rodgers had remade Broadway. Gags'n'gals musical comedy was virtually extinct and the leading writers had moved over to the form established by Oklahoma! and Carousel, and 'musical play'. If R&H seem conventional today, it's because they invented the conventions: let the story dic- tate the tone (`Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin"), let the character find their own singing voice (`Some Enchanted Evening' for the older, aristocratic French planter, `A Cockeyed Optimist' for the younger, chirpy midwestern ensign).

Scoff at the Rodgers and Hammerstein format and Mordden protests, 'what for- mat?' These boys start their first show (Oklahoma!) with a solo voice singing off- stage and, on their second (Carousel),

skip the overture and lay out all the exposi- tion and the principal characters in a pan- tomime. A pantomime in waltz-time, too. More than that, a pantomime in waltz-time that manages to be naturalistic. Then, after making the extended 'dream ballet' de rigueur on Broadway, in South Pacific they dispense with the choreographer altogether, staging Nothin' Like A Dame' so that the horny, frustrated sailors just stomp about like horny, frustrated sailors. Format?

Even the despised happy endings are, in fact, hopeful endings: the King (of Siam) is dead, long live the King.

I see plays and read books that emphasise the seamy side of life, and the frenetic side and the tragic side [said Hammerstein] and I don't deny the existence of the tragic and the frenetic. But I say that somebody has to keep saying that that isn't all that there is to life . . . We're very likely to get thrown off our balance if we have such a preponderance of artists expressing the 'waste land' philoso- phy.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's America, with its sense of building community through commitment and justice, is art as aspira- tion. 'It & H believed what most of us want to believe,' says Mordden.

And that's part of the problem: Okla- homa!, Carousel, South Pacific . . . These shows are radical, revolutionary, trail- blazing, yet they're not flawed masterpieces like Sondheim or Weill. They're just regu- lar masterpieces that stack up a ton of money. And how can anything that popular be that good? The receipts of The Sound of Music alone have obliterated everything else:

The festering Jud Fry, the abused and abus- ing Billy Bigelow, Allegro's casual leadership-class adultery, the volcanically sexual rapport between Anna and the King, and Pipe Dream's hookshop are forgotten.

Morrden's book reclaims Rodgers and Hammerstein as artists — even though, in defiance of what we suppose an artist to be and of Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American lives, they weren't angry young men but painstaking middle-aged men.

Larry Hart, who turned down Oklahoma! because he thought it was dull, understood. Alan Jay Lerner once told me of being with Hart and Fritz Loewe during a blackout. Loewe switched on a radio: it was playing something from Oklahoma! and Hart's cigar puffed furiously in the dark. Loewe tuned to another station, and another: all were playing Oklahoma! and Hart's cigar puffed brighter and brighter. Eventually, they found another station playing some other tune, and Hart's cigar subsided. When the lights came on again, Hart con- tinued the conversation as though nothing had happened, but Lerner described it to me as a man confronting his own obsoles- cence. Rodgers and Hart were kids doing the show in a barn; with Hammerstein, the musical grew up.