Hammerstein had also been active in the Writers’ War Board, a privately organized propaganda organization that worked in close coordination with a raft of government agencies to promote the Allied cause and combat racism and anti-Semitism on the home front. The group was instrumental in persuading the military to hire black medical workers and the Red Cross to stop classifying donated blood by race. Authors like Stephen Vincent Benét and Thornton Wilder wrote articles, essays, speeches, radio scripts, and books in support of the war effort. Oscar attended the group’s weekly meetings every Wednesday, while also serving on committees to create a radio show and promote naval aviation. After the war, this group reconstituted itself as the Writers Board for World Government, a part of the growing World Federalist Movement. Under the leadership of Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and others, the movement advocated the formation of an international government stronger than the United Nations, and it would become the most passionate political cause of Oscar’s later life.
At the same time, Hammerstein remained very involved in ASCAP, and he would also serve as president of the Authors Guild, an organization devoted to copyright protection and the preservation of writers’ creative rights.
In Hollywood, Hammerstein’s political and philanthropic activities had not impinged on his creative work, if only because there was not much challenging or satisfying work for him to do. Now, with Oklahoma! still playing to packed houses (and requiring regular auditions for cast replacements and touring companies) and Carousel having just closed, Oscar found he had less time for the painstaking process of writing.
Dick Rodgers was just as busy. “Even now, it is hard to write calmly about this extraordinary period in my life,” he recalled in his memoirs. “There was just no letup. No sooner had we stopped one project than we began another. Most of the time, we worked on a number of shows simultaneously. Every day required an unending stream of decisions. Who would succeed Ethel Merman during her vacation? Which moving picture company offer should we consider for John Loves Mary? What record company should we choose for the original cast album of our next show? Could I afford the time to see the young interviewer from the Los Angeles Times?”
It was against this background that Oscar began to dig into what would become his most autobiographical, most deeply personal work, one that would bedevil him not only for the many months of its troubled creation but for the rest of his life.
* * *
HAMMERSTEIN HAD LONG had it in mind to write the story of one man’s life from birth to death. In the end, he would settle for chronicling the span from birth to thirty-five years old. His protagonist was Joseph Taylor Jr., the son of a small-town midwestern doctor. Joe follows his father into medicine but falls under the spell of an ambitious and avaricious wife. She leads him to abandon his principles—and the art he was born to practice—for the empty life of a society doctor in Chicago, dispensing pills and rest cures, raising money, and making the scene. The title for the new show summed up the lead character’s mad dash through an empty life: Allegro, the Italian musical term for a lively, brisk tempo. In Oscar’s vision, Joe gets so caught up in the worldly swirl around him that he loses sight of what matters most.
It was perhaps no accident that Hammerstein chose to make his hero a doctor. His own doctor, Harold Hyman, had also been one of his closest friends since childhood, and he consulted him closely. Dick Rodgers was drawn to the subject because his father and brother were both distinguished physicians.
Allegro may be the only show in Broadway history whose creators set out to make it deliberately uncommercial. From the beginning, Hammerstein’s notion was a minimalist musical, with a spare approach to storytelling that would take its inspiration from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Naturalism would blend with a Greek chorus that would be “used frequently to interpret the mental and emotional reactions of the principal characters,” as Hammerstein wrote in prefatory directions to the published script. There would be no walls, no windows, no conventional stage sets. Instead, “backgrounds for action” would be “achieved by small scenic pieces on a moving stage by light projections and by drops.”
The new show would once again be produced under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and Hammerstein had begun work on the script in the spring of 1946, when he and Dorothy were sailing to Australia to visit her relatives at the time of the Broadway opening of Annie Get Your Gun. When their ship docked in Brisbane, Oscar sent about a fifth of the draft script and several lyrics off to Dick. Typically, Rodgers immediately sat down and wrote three melodies. Years later, Oscar would describe his intentions in writing the play: “I was concerned when I wrote Allegro about men who are good at anything—writers, doctors, lawyers, business, and who are diverted from the field of their expertness by a kind of strange, informal conspiracy that goes on. People start pinning medals on them. People start asking them to join committees or chair committees. And the first thing you know, they are no longer writing, or practicing medicine or practicing law. They are committee chairmen. They are speechmakers. They are dinner-attenders. And this emaciates their achievements.”
The script begins in 1905, with the lights rising on a mother in bed with a newborn child, and a chorus on the opposite side of the stage explaining:
The lady in bed is Marjorie Taylor,
Doctor Joseph Taylor’s wife.
Except for the day when she married Joe,
This is the happiest day of her life!
Her husband enters and they “gaze down fondly at their first born,” as the chorus intones:
His hair is fuzzy,
His eyes are blue.
His eyes may change—
They often do.
He weighs eight pounds
And an ounce or two—
Joseph Taylor Junior!
Much of the show’s first act leaned heavily on Oscar’s memories of his own childhood—the death of his grandmother Nimmo and his mother’s death. “I always felt his songs came out of his feelings about her,” his son Bill would recall. He would spend more than a year on act one, drafting and revising in his usual painstaking practice. The dramaturgy was novel in several ways. After the grandmother dies early in the story, her spirit returns at crucial turns in the plot to sing or comment on the unfolding action. The chorus and other characters describe Joe Jr.’s childhood, but he himself is never seen. His character’s voice is not heard until twelve pages into the script, and the actor portraying him does not appear in the flesh until he gets to college.
In all this, Oscar was plowing new ground. Though he wouldn’t (and didn’t) put it this way at the time, he was pioneering what would come to be called the “concept musical,” a work in which avant-garde theatrical techniques and devices are used to comment on the action, and in which traditional linear narrative is often secondary to style, metaphor, or message. The problem for Hammerstein was delineating just what message he wanted to convey. He had proven himself a master adapter of existing dramatic or literary works with both Oklahoma! and Carousel, and Show Boat before that. He had also written original books for most of his other major collaborations with Kern, Romberg, and Friml. But here Oscar’s narrative gifts seemed to elude him. In Joseph Taylor Jr., Hammerstein had a concept, all right. It is far less clear that he ever had a real character, a complex, flesh-and-blood human being like Curly or Billy Bigelow, who could explain and examine his motivations and feelings in song, as Oscar himself had now conditioned Broadway audiences to expect.
Throughout Allegro, Oscar would repeatedly commit the writer’s cardinal sin of telling, not showing. In the beginning of the play, Joe Jr.’s parents and fellow townspeople sing about him. The chorus describes the process of his learning to walk in song—“One Foot, Other Foot”—but we never see the boy himself. His parents are given a beautiful ballad—“A Fellow Needs a Girl”—expressing the quiet contentments of married love, but Joe’s first appearance is as a college freshman, singing this trivial (if admi
ttedly catchy) song:
It’s a darn nice campus,
With ivy on the walls,
Friendly maples
Outside the lecture halls,
A new gymnasium,
A chapel with a dome—
It’s a darn nice campus …
And I wish I were home.
Joe’s one and only sweetheart is his childhood friend Jennie Brinker, a grasping (and ultimately adulterous) woman, with more than a little of Myra Finn’s mercurial character. His one big ballad of longing for her, “You Are Never Away,” is first sung to him by the chorus. One of the show’s best numbers, “So Far,” an infectious Rodgers tune, set to lyrics about the early stages of a romantic relationship, is thrown away on a passing character named Beulah, a casual college date of Joe’s who never appears again. Before the end of the first act, Jennie induces a heart attack in Joe’s mother, who doubts the girl’s love for her son and dies. The curtain falls at intermission with Joe and Jennie married before a congregation whose musings aloud reflect their own ambivalence, as a chorus sings ringing repetitions of the exhortation, “Wish them well.”
* * *
HAMMERSTEIN SPENT EIGHTEEN months writing this first act, and as rehearsals loomed in the late summer of 1947, he churned out the second act in just two weeks. In it, Joe, now a doctor in his father’s practice, bows to Jennie’s urgings that he leave their small town for a job at a big hospital in Chicago, where his college roommate Charlie also works and has taken to drink out of boredom. Joe rises in the hospital hierarchy but derives less and less satisfaction from his work caring for hypochondriac socialites. He is oblivious to his wife’s affair with a hospital board member, and takes his loyal and long-suffering nurse, Emily, for granted. Finally at the breaking point, he has an epiphany and is summoned home by the loving voice of his mother’s ghost in a moving ballad, “Come Home,” and takes Emily and Charlie with him as the chorus swells in a reprise of “One Foot, Other Foot.” He is learning to walk all over again.
If that all sounds a bit baffling from a distance of seventy years, it was equally confusing to some on the creative team mounting the show. Four days before rehearsals began, Agnes de Mille, who had been engaged as both choreographer and director—the first woman to win such an assignment for a big Broadway musical—felt compelled to ask Oscar just what the hell the show was about. “It’s about a man not being allowed to do his own work because of worldly pressures,” Oscar replied. “That’s not the play you’ve written,” de Mille answered. “You haven’t written your second act.” Oscar’s resigned reply was that the producers were already committed to the Majestic Theatre in New York in October.
Indeed, the whole project had gotten out of hand. Hammerstein’s notion of a physical production so simple that college and amateur troupes might easily stage it had turned into something completely different. To make room for de Mille’s dancers, the scenic and lighting designer Jo Mielziner had initially conceived a stylized set featuring a giant cyclorama with projected images. But he was dissatisfied with the projections and substituted painted drops, sliding platforms and realistic props like chairs and tables that could be moved on- and offstage. The elaborate scheme of treadmills, pendulum stages, curtains, loudspeakers, and projected images would require forty stagehands—twice the usual number.
Still, Mielziner was a genius, a superb artist who could draw freehand sketches of proposed sets to scale. He had built a working merry-go-round for Carousel, and for Allegro he had devised a serpentine, S-shaped curtain that ran along a continuous floor-to-ceiling track, allowing one scene to dissolve into the next, in cinematic fashion. This eliminated the usual need for some scenes to be played “in one,” at the foot of the stage, while stagehands worked behind a fixed drop curtain. The concept was revolutionary but would prove very expensive.
Similarly, Oscar’s vision of an Our Town–like ensemble cast had ballooned into a company worthy of the Metropolitan Opera: eighteen principals, twenty-one supporting players, twenty-two dancers, thirty-eight singers, and an orchestra of thirty-five players—requiring some three hundred costumes. All this spectacle sent the budget soaring above $300,000—more than three times the cost of Oklahoma!
That August, a reporter for Cue magazine was allowed to sit in on auditions, and the resulting story captured the feeling of the production team at work. Hammerstein declared that one actor “looks like a room clerk,” while Rodgers was particularly taken with one young actress. “Let her read anything,” he said. “I’m crazy about her. She’s got more guts. The times she’s been in here…” He addressed her directly, “Just sing it sweet, darling. Don’t try to be comic,” before telling his colleagues, “I’m in love with that silly little puss she has.” Terry Helburn’s deadpan reply: “But the body will have to be toned down.”
Once more, the cast was made up mostly of unknowns. Annamary Dickey, who played Marjorie Taylor, had sung at the Metropolitan Opera, and John Battles, who played Joe Jr., had been in the original cast of On the Town in 1944. The newcomer Lisa Kirk, in the comparatively small role of the nurse, Emily, would become a star on the strength of the show’s most enduring song, “The Gentleman Is a Dope,” which her character sings in frustration at Joe’s heedlessness.
A worm’s-eye view observer of the proceedings was the seventeen-year-old Stephen Sondheim, whom Oscar had hired for the summer as a $25-a-week gofer after his first year at Williams College, fetching coffee, typing scripts, and soaking everything in. “It was a seminal influence on my life, because it showed me a lot of smart people doing something wrong,” Sondheim would remember. The experience would also haunt his own creative work. “That’s why I’m drawn to experiment,” he would say. “I realize that I am trying to recreate Allegro all the time.” In the short term, Sondheim was appalled by de Mille’s handling of her first directorial assignment. She complained to Oscar that she couldn’t devise new dances while also staging new songs and new scenes. So Hammerstein took on direction of the dialogue scenes (in addition to doing daily rewrites of the script starting at five a.m.), while Rodgers staged the songs. “It was not a satisfactory solution by any means,” Rodgers would recall.
The opening night of the New Haven tryout, September 1, was one of the most famous train wrecks in Broadway history. First, a principal dancer, Ray Harrison, caught his foot in a scenery track on the floor of the stage, shredded the ligaments in his right leg, and was carried screaming from the stage. Then William Ching, playing Joe Taylor Sr., was right in the middle of “A Fellow Needs a Girl” when the scenery wall behind him started to collapse and he was forced to hold it up till the stagehands caught on. Lisa Kirk, singing “The Gentleman Is a Dope,” also caught her foot in the curtain track and tumbled off the stage into the orchestra below. Luckily, the Shubert Theatre in New Haven had no traditional pit, so “the two cellists who caught her simply hoisted her back onto the stage and she didn’t stop singing through the entire accident,” Rodgers would recall.
“Need I tell you, the audience was giving her an ovation the Pope has never received,” Sondheim would remember. “Everybody pushed her back onstage and she had to take two bows. Next day in The New York Herald Tribune … Billy Rose, of all people, said, ‘A star is born.’ Next night she comes back, gets to the same point in the song, and starts to fall again and the entire audience gasps because they’d all read the Herald Tribune. She recovers quickly, they all sigh and she gets another ovation. Oscar came backstage at the end and said, ‘You do that a third time and you’re fired.’”
Finally, at the climax of the evening, when the chorus began to sing to Joe, “Come home, come home, where the brown birds fly,” smoke from an alley fire outside the theater began drifting in through doors propped open against the steamy September night, and perhaps fifty or sixty people made for the exits in fear before Josh Logan, in town to provide an impartial critique for Rodgers and Hammerstein, shouted an explanation and told them to stay put. Logan may have saved the day, but he could not
save the show—though he tried, in two fevered letters to Oscar after seeing Allegro twice.
Even with the opening night mishaps, Logan wrote on September 4, “it’s a wonderful job on everyone’s part.” But then he got down to brass tacks. “I hesitate to tell you again how much I dislike the grandmother,” he wrote. “I felt a real and growing resistance to her in the audience and I believe this will increase.” He urged Hammerstein to “get Joe on sooner.” He complained that most all the songs were “unexcitingly staged and performed.” He asked, “Do you or Dick feel that the chorus sings too much of ‘You Are Never Away’ before Joe sings it, thus robbing it of its full effect when he sings the whole thing?” “The mother dying on stage is hard to take and hard to set.” He concluded in all capital letters: “DON’T READ THIS IF YOU GET MAD EASY,” before suggesting that Joe needed a “personal musical moment” in the second act. “It’s just that I’m so fond of Joe, I hate to see other people take over moments that should be his—he’s the story and he’s the best actor in the show.”
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