Oklahoma! played for five years—three times longer than any play previously, and a record until 1961. In London it also became the longest-running play up to that time. And in 1944 it won a special Pulitzer Prize. It was also the first musical to have an original cast album on 78 rpm (LPs were four years in the future).
Said Frank Rich, of the New York Times, “In form, Oklahoma! went beyond its predecessors by accentuating songs in which the characters directly expressed their motivations and feelings: ballets were not thrown in for divertissement, but, like the score, either advanced the story or explored a character’s psyche.”
Alfred Drake as cowboy Curly McLain and Joan Roberts as farm girl Laurey Williams
Oklahoma! changed the musical as much as, possibly more than, Show Boat had sixteen years earlier. It served notice that the bar had been raised and pointed to a future in which all elements—words, characterization, plot, staging, music, and dance—were to be seamlessly woven together. It announced a turning point in the development of the book musical.
The show’s success also marked the beginning of what was to be a rewarding collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. It was a collaboration that would allow both artists to work in the sequence they preferred: Oscar writing the words first, and Dick then composing the melodies. Up to that time, most of the popular song lyrics for musicals were written with the melody being conceived first, followed by the lyrics. Now Rodgers and Hammerstein would change that, too.
Oscar Hammerstein II
Oscar later said,
I have conducted no exhaustive investigation of this subject, but these developments, as I remember them, seem to have been the chief influences which established the American songwriter’s habit of writing music first and the words later. It is a strange habit, an illogical one, but not entirely without compensating virtues. Writing in this way, I have frequently fallen into the debt of my composers for words and ideas that might never have occurred to me had they not been suggested by music. If one has a feeling for music—and anyone who wants to write lyrics had better have this feeling—the repeated playing of a melody may create a mood or start a train of thought that results in an unusual lyric. Words written in this way are likely to conform to the spirit of the music. It is difficult to fit words into the rigid framework of a composer’s meter, but this very confinement might also force an author into the concise eloquence which is the very essence of poetry. There is in all art a fine balance between the benefits of confinement and the benefits of freedom.
After seeing Oklahoma!, MGM’s Sam Goldwyn gave Richard Rodgers some unasked for advice about what to do next: “Shoot yourself!”
Dick and Oscar passed on that advice. They also decided that the usual blather in the annual Variety wouldn’t do; this time he would have something to say. He ran an advertisement that listed his recent flops and their embarrassingly short runs. Then at the bottom he put: “I’ve done it before, and I can do it again!”
It was the talk of the town, with everyone wondering what, precisely, did it mean? Most applauded it as a modest gesture from a modest man. Maybe.
Oscar’s apology in Variety magazine
Oscar later explained, “What I really was trying to do with that ad was thumb my nose and say: ‘Well, you hyenas, so you thought I was all washed up?’”
Following the success of Oklahoma!, Oscar happily returned to work on Carmen Jones. He shifted the locale to the American South, replaced Spanish gypsies with Southern blacks, and called for an all-black cast. Billy Rose agreed to produce the show and hired John Hammond to scout talent. (Hammond would go on at Columbia Records to champion and/or discover an astonishing array and range of talent including Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen.) A committed crusader for racial equality, Hammond refused to take any pay as he set forth on a six-month, forty-city search for African Americans—stockyard workers, bellhops, elevator operators, and police officers—with amateur acting talent, finally finding Carmen Jones working in a Philadelphia camera store. Opening on December 2, 1943, while Oklahoma! was still in its first year on Broadway, Carmen Jones ran for 502 performances. Oscar Hammerstein personally considered it among his very best work.
Then, in January l944, Dick and Oscar had lunch with Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild. Helburn and Langner suggested, sotto voce to avoid prying ears, that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s next musical should be an adaptation of Ferenc Molnar’s much-loved play Liliom. By the time the cannelloni had been consumed and the ice cream and raisin cake delivered, the verdict was in: no thanks. Besides the fact that fantasies are trouble, the Molnar’s depiction of Hungary seemed too bleak a place to invite an audience for an evening’s entertainment. This was a serious problem. Rodgers and Hammerstein agreed to at least think about it.
They did.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” sheet music from Carousel, 1945
Dick brought his family, and he and Oscar worked weekends at Doylestown. To make the play a bit more upbeat, they needed to move the story from Budapest to America. They tossed around the idea of giving it the Creole lilt of New Orleans, but this opened up problems of dialect and musical style. Finally, Dick suggested the New England coast; Maine circa l873, for instance. Carousel was on its way. Oscar radically changed the ending and spent two weeks writing “My Boy Bill,” which became “Soliloquy”: a seven-and-a-half-minute operatic solo sung by the lead character, carnival barker Billy Bigelow. In the song, Billy has found out that his wife, Julie, is pregnant, and he ponders life as father of a son. Oscar I would have marveled at his grandson’s creative synthesis, for the song begins, in the operatic tradition, as a recitative of a boastful father:
I wonder what he’ll think of me!
I guess he’ll call me
“The old man.”
I guess he’ll think I can lick
Ev’ry other feller’s father—
Well, I can!
I bet that he’ll turn out to be
The spit an’ image
Of his dad,
But he’ll have more common sense
Than his puddin’-headed father
Ever had.
Right away we can see that this isn’t really about his son. It’s all about him—boastful, bullying, vain, and intellectually insecure.
I’ll teach him to wrassle,
And dive through a wave,
When we go in the mornin’s for our swim.
His mother can teach him
The way to behave,
But she won’t make a sissy out o’ him—
Not him!
Not my boy!
Not Bill!
Bill …
[sung] My boy, Bill!
I will see
That he’s named
After me,
I will!
My boy, Bill—
He’ll be tall
And tough
As a tree,
Will Bill.
Like a tree he’ll grow,
With his head held high
And his feet planted firm on the ground,
And you won’t see no—
body dare to try
To boss or toss him around!
Billy’s going to have fun teaching his son to be a stubborn, “manly” man like himself.
No pot-bellied, baggy-eyed bully’ll boss him around.
A hint of a grudge emerges. He lists jobs for his now-grown son that illuminates the type of roustabout work with which he’s familiar.
I don’t give a damn what he does,
As long as he does what he likes.
He can sit on his tail
Or work on a rail
With a hammer, a-hammerin’ spikes.
He can ferry a boat on the river
Or peddle a pack on his back
Or work up and down
The streets of a town
With a whip and
a horse and a hack.
He can haul a scow along a canal,
Run a cow around a corral,
Or maybe bark for a carousel
Of course it takes talent to do that well.
He might be a champ of the heavyweights
Or a feller that sells you glue,
Or President of the United States—
That’d be all right too.
[spoken] His mother’d like that. But he wouldn’t be President unless he wanted to be!
[sung] Not Bill!
Billy boasts of his own talents and again declaims his—and his son’s—right to be stubborn, to bridle at authority. He pursues the angry thought further, revealing more of past resentments.
My boy, Bill—
He’ll be tall
And as tough
As a tree,
Will Bill!
Like a tree he’ll grow,
With his head held high,
And his feet planted firm on the ground,
And you won’t see no—
body dare to try
To boss him or toss him around!
No fat-bottomed, flabby-faced, pot-bellied, baggy-eyed bastard’ll boss him around!
And I’m damned if he’ll marry his boss’s daughter,
A skinny-lipped virgin with blood like water,
Who’ll give him a peck and call it a kiss
And look in his eyes through a lorgnette …
[spoken] Say! Why am I talkin’ on like this? My kid ain’t even been born yet!
Billy shakes off the menacing memories. His attention now turns back to his son and to his advice for ensnaring the female sex.
[sung] I can see him
When he’s seventeen or so
And startin’ in to go
With a girl.
I can give him
Lots o’ pointers, very sound,
On the way to get round
Any girl.
Now comes the whiplash moment. Everything Billy has expressed up till now fades before a new thought: his son may be a daughter! Just as he projected himself onto his theoretical son, he now merges the qualities of his wife with his unnamed daughter and reveals a completely different fatherliness—one of tenderness, protectiveness, responsibility, and awe.
I can tell him—
[spoken] Wait a minute! Could it be? What the hell! What if he is a girl? Bill! Oh, Bill! What would I do with her? What could I do for her? A bum—with no money!
[sung] You can have fun with a son,
But you got to be a father
To a girl!
She mightn’t be so bad at that—
A kid with ribbons
In her hair,
A kind o’ sweet and petite
Little tin type of her mother—
What a pair!
[spoken] I can hear myself braggin’about her!
[sung] My little girl,
Pink and white
As peaches and cream is she.
My little girl
Is half again as bright
As girls are meant to be!
Dozens of boys pursue her,
Many a likely lad
Does what he can to woo her
From her faithful dad.
She has a few
Pink and white young fellers of two or three—
But my little girl
Gets hungry ev’ry night
And she comes home to me …
Billy feels an overwhelming love. The recitative yields. The music now swells with urgency as fear floods his thoughts. Things were fine for a boy, but they are all wrong for a girl. He must act to change this. Now!
[sung] I got to get ready before she comes,
I got to make certain that she
Won’t be dragged up in slums
With a lot o’ bums—
Like me!
She’s got to be sheltered and fed and dressed
In the best that money can buy!
I never knew how to get money,
But, I’ll try!
By God! I’ll try!
I’ll go out and make it
Or steal it or take it
Or die!
Impending doom? Of course! But this song has compressed his life and death into the end of the first act—not the second. Act two centers on Billy’s purgatorial efforts to grow up, fess up, and move up to heaven. This is not a boy-meets-girl story; it’s a story about Billy’s struggle for redemption. And Oscar’s too, perhaps.
Oscar often wrote while standing
“Soliloquy” turned out to be the key that unlocked Rodgers and Hammersteins creative juices as the rest of the play began to take shape. Although Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t want to imitate themselves, they did hire most of the Oklahoma! team and continued to cast unknown actors, rather than stars.
Things didn’t go well at Carousel previews in New Haven or Boston: the show was too long, for one thing. There was much rewriting and scene changing. Oscar’s original opening—an appropriately elderly Mr. and Mrs. God sitting on rocking chairs outside their New England cottage—got left on the Boston cutting-room floor.
On April l9, l945, Carousel opened across the street from the still-going-strong Oklahoma! The score was rich and Oscar’s lyrics had never been more meaningful or moving. Irving Berlin considered “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to be the best song Oscar ever wrote. The lyrics conveyed Oscar’s take on Emersonian self-reliance, his faith in the brotherhood of man, and his positive view of life.
Carousel revolves around the relationship between a late-nineteenth-century New England mill girl named Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow, the carousel barker she falls in love with (despite being warned by the mill owner of his unsavory reputation with “young things”). They marry and it isn’t long before Billy begins to treat her badly—at times becoming violent. Steadfast despite his behavior, Julie refuses to see him as he is and remains in love with him. When she tells Billy that she is pregnant, her proud but jobless husband is overwhelmed by the impending responsibilities of fatherhood and agrees to join in a plot (that he had previously declined) to rob the mill owner.
Even before the robbery Billy loses his potential share of the loot in a card game. Then the robbery fails; the money isn’t where they thought it would be and the victim is armed. Billy is cornered by the police and kills himself with his knife, dying as a distraught Julie arrives on the scene.
Fifteen years later Billy Bigelow is at Heaven’s Gate, where the “Starkeeper” explains that he is being given a chance at redemption: he is being sent back to earth to make amends for the pain he once caused his loved ones. Louise, his fifteen-year-old daughter is, sadly, much like her father—a rebel without a cause. Claiming to be a friend of her father’s, Billy gives her a star he took from heaven as a gift; he also confesses his love to Julie. An invisible Billy attends the final scene, Louise’s high school graduation, where he whispers to her much-needed advice about having faith and courage in life. The three of them join with the rest of the townspeople in singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Curtain.
Oscar’s hard-won experience with the boy-meets-girl story led him to write songs for many of his shows that could be called delayed-gratification love songs. Oscar felt that he needed to develop the character of each lead before they could be joined together romantically, but he didn’t want the audience to wait the whole first act before he threw in the necessary romantic sparks. Yet if he had them fall in love in the first act, it would diminish the conflict and undermine the dramatic tension of the second act. His solution became a Hammerstein convention: the not-yet-in-love song. For Show Boat he wrote “Make Believe.” For Oklahoma! he wrote “People Will Say We’re in Love.” And for Carousel he wrote “If I Loved You,” of which the lyrics are:
If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an e
asy way—
Round in circles I’d go!
Longin’ to tell you, but afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances pass me by.
Soon you’d leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
In these songs Oscar was able to write a love duet that revealed his characters’ love for each other. Even if the characters are too proud, stubborn, or shy to admit their true feelings, the audience can see true love behind their false reticence. Oscar knew his craft—in this way he could have his cake and eat it too.
Richard Rodgers and Irving Berlin considered Carousel to be Oscar’s best and most important work. Carousel was love and death. Carousel was Oscar’s opera. The show ran for 890 performances.
Oklahoma! and Carousel resonated powerfully with the audiences of the early 1940s.
While the two shows are now considered timeless classics, it is worth acknowledging how timeliness played a crucial part in the success of these two masterpieces.
The love story of Oklahoma! is framed by a larger story about a fledgling community in the process of self-definition as a brand-new state. Farmers and cowmen have significant land-use differences, but those differences are subsumed by the common purpose of statehood. They are, sometimes volubly, trying to come to grips with, and answer, the question: Who are we as Oklahomans? In 1943, as American soldiers marched into two theatres of war, all Americans asked a similar question, writ large: Who are we? What matters to us? What are we made of? Americans had begun to grapple with this question of identity during the Great War, but had been a late-arrival “spoiler” at Europe’s four-year bloodbath. World War II was far different. It wasn’t about blood and treasure. This war was a life-and-death, ideological struggle whose outcome was far from certain. This war required faith and sacrifice from all Americans.
Those boys watching Oklahoma! in the back of the theatre knew that their fate was just as uncertain. They knew, like the farmers and the cowmen did, that whatever their differences, their commonality of purpose—that which made them truly, deeply American—was all that really mattered if they were to hope to prevail in the Armageddon overseas. These soldiers saw Oklahoma! as a metaphor for their own probable ultimate sacrifice. They stamped and clapped and laughed and cried. The country, the show, and the soldiers were as one.
The Hammersteins Page 12