No one adored the world of the theatre more than Richard Rodgers. Tryouts, rewrites, opening nights—this was Dick’s idea of heaven. He wanted to write a musical-comedy valentine to his backstage world. He wanted to literally turn the stage around and let the audience see it as he saw it, to show how theatre magic was made. And no death, just love and laughs.
Oscar Hammerstein
Generally, Dick and Oscar would hash out the story as a team. But this was Dick’s story—a simple comedy about a show-within-a-show called Me and Juliet.
With the stage literally flipped around, two stories weave through the show. The primary story presents a love triangle between a stage manager, a chorus girl, and a bully of an electrician. The secondary plot is a romance on hold—played for laughs and dancing. Scenes from the musical they are presenting—also titled Me and Juliet—are generously interspersed throughout.
Damned by polite praise, the show managed a meager 358 performances and hadn’t the steam to tour. This was a flop by Rodgers and Hammerstein standards. And there were many reasons why. To begin with, the play within was a problem. The real audience came to see Me and Juliet, not the same-named musical within. The concept posed an intractable dilemma. The musical within had to be different from, and implicitly inferior to, the musical without, the one people actually paid to see. Why else bother with the musical without? And the musical within wasted valuable narrative time. But was the musical play without any more interesting? And why dilute good music with ersatz music? Musical humor wears thin fast.
Secondly, Oscar didn’t really write laugh-out-loud funny material. His was more of a dry-chuckle funny. He was out of his element with this concept, and the show proved it. Dick wrote a lot of hot, danceable tunes that Larry Hart would have adored, but Oscar wrote some of his least engaging lyrics. These characters simply didn’t interest him enough. Where was the depth of character to be revealed in a Billy Bigelow “Soliloquy” or a king’s puzzlement? Smiles, he did. Laughs? He was lost.
Only one song, “No Other Love,” made the jump into the standard catalogue. But in another song, “The Big Black Giant,” Oscar defiantly set forth his own, more lofty motivation for writing musical plays and implicitly rebuked musical comedy’s frivolity—and his own complicity in Rodger’s folly:
The water in a river is changed every day
As it flows from the hills to the sea.
But to people on the shore, the river is the same—
Or at least, it appears to be.
The audience in a theatre is changed every night,
As a show runs along on its way.
But to people on the stage the audience looks the same,
Every night, every matinee:
A big black giant
Who looks and listens
With thousands of eyes and ears,
A big black mass
Of love and pity
And troubles and hopes and fears;
And every night
The mixture’s diff’rent,
Although it may look the same.
To feel his way
With every mixture
Is part of the actor’s game.
One night it’s a laughing giant;
Another night a weeping giant.
One night it’s a coughing giant;
Another night a sleeping giant.
Every night you fight the giant
And maybe, if you win,
You send him out a nicer giant
Than he was when he came in …
But if he doesn’t like you, then all you can do
Is to pack up your makeup and go.
For an actor in a flop there isn’t any choice
But to look for another show.
That big black giant
Who looks and listens
With thousands of eyes and ears,
That big black mass
Of love and pity
And troubles and hopes and fears,
Will sit out there
And rule your life
For all of your living years.
While much can be said of Oscar’s lack of humor or his inability to conceive the interior show’s modus operandi—something he would have left to Agnes de Mille or Josh Logan and prayed—the play’s failure rested squarely on Richard Rodgers head. Turning the show around was like watching a magician from behind. The craft was revealed. The magic was lost.
Oscar and Dick each had their high-concept “idea” shows fall flat with the public. Sensing the need to return to narrative coherence and realism, they chose their next adaptation carefully.
In 1945 John Steinbeck had published a sweet, sad, comical character study of the denizens of Cannery Row in post-Depression, pre–World War II Monterey, California. He then attempted to write a libretto adaption of his story, but eventually shelved the idea in favor of writing a sequel, which became Sweet Thursday, published in 1954. Soon after, Rodgers and Hammerstein acquired the musical rights to this sequel and fashioned a love story out of it.
To all the “working girls” of the Bear Flag Café and all the guys at the Palace Flophouse, Doc, the local marine biologist, is a friendly fixture of their Cannery Row neighborhood. Sweet, young Suzy, a runaway, blows into town and proves too sweet and shy to join the oldest profession. The local characters know sparks of true love when they see them and conspire, with eventual success, to unite Doc and Suzy.
On November 30, 1955, Pipe Dream—named after the boiler-pipe abode of the lead female character—opened at the Shubert Theatre. Pipe Dream managed only a 246-performance run before closing. It marked Dick and Oscar’s least successful collaboration—the nearest thing to a flop the team had written. Louis Kronenberger, in Time magazine, summed it up well: “Proficient, professional, and disappointing. ”
Helen Traubel as Fauna
Rodgers forever lamented the casting of Helen Traubel—a true Wagnerian soprano with career-long crossover dreams—who proved woefully miscast as Fauna, the bordello madam with a heart of gold. She came off all wrong—too much Brunhilde, not enough Miss Kitty. Dick, very unfortunately, had turned Julie Andrews down for the cast and told her to stick with another show she’d auditioned for, My Fair Lady. Most unfortunately of all, Rodgers had recently been diagnosed with throat cancer and the surgery that soon followed had prevented him from overseeing much of the development of the show. The material suffered from his absence. Without Richard Rodgers’s worldly perspective on the “sporting life,” there was no one to one put the brakes on Oscar’s truly misplaced sentimentality.
While the music was spared most of the critics’ opprobrium, the book was another matter. Critics chided Oscar for his maudlin, candy-coated treatment of “street life.” It is a safe bet that Oscar had no inkling of the world he was writing about and so made things too warm and fuzzy to be believable.
The question could not be ignored: After Allegro, Me and Juliet, and Pipe Dream, could Rodgers and Hammerstein write another true Rodgers and Hammerstein show? Judged by the standards they themselves had created, it seemed they could not.
And yet, that didn’t stop them from trying. C. Y. Lee’s 1957 novel, The Flower Drum Song, set in San Francisco’s Chinese community, explored the conflict between two generations of an Asian-American family as they made preparations for a traditional “arranged” marriage—as seen more or less through the eyes of the patriarch who stubbornly clung to his old Chinese ways in his new American world.
Flower Drum Song sheet music
Producer Joe Fields—son of Lew, brother of Herbert and Dorothy—suggested the material to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Both found something that appealed; Dick liked the “hip” musical comedy nature of it, and Oscar liked the inherent cross-cultural and cross-generational bifurcations of a story, which held his interest in a way that the disappointing Me and Juliet and the disastrous Pipe Dream never had. The show could be funny and meaty, sexy and preachy.
Oscar invited Joe to cowrite the libretto
—to bring his fresh pair of eyes to this new venture—and their adaptation significantly opened up the story to resemble Oscar’s favorite plot configuration: two love stories, one played for depth, the other for laughs, though not exclusively. And no one dies.
New blood was called for. As there was no sufficient Asian acting community from which to draw, a polyglot troupe comprising Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, black, and white actors was assembled. In keeping with the growing late-1950s trend of hiring choreographer-directors, famed movie dancer Gene Kelly was hired to direct. Dancer Carol Haney choreographed. Luther Henderson arranged the dances. None had prior experience in the task for which he or she was hired.
The story begins with Sammy Fong, a hip, happily assimilated owner of a Chinese nightclub in Chinatown. His old-world family has imported a picture-bride named Mei Li in the hope of cooling his affections for a sexy, Americanized dancer named Linda Low. Sammy passes Mei Li off to a friend, Wang Ta, in the hopes of getting out of the marriage contract. But Wang Ta also likes Linda Low and proposes to her. She tries to leverage the proposal to get Sammy to finally commit to the stroll down the aisle with her. Mei Li warms to Wang Ta, but he’s not impressed until she makes the effort to assimilate by dressing in American garb. Confrontations with traditional parents ensue. Complications arise. The Chinese Community Council weighs in. In the end the marriage contract is rendered null and void on a technicality—at the altar. Sammy Fong gets Linda Low. Wang Ta gets Mei Li. The ending is happy.
Flower Drum Song belied the truism that if “it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.” With its energized cavalcade of fresh faces, it ran a very decent six hundred performances, had a great road life, and was made into a popular movie.
And then it promptly disappeared. Like Show Boat, Flower Drum Song found itself mired in revisionist criticism. Did it transcend, or traffic in, ethnic stereotype? Is any meditation on cultural assimilation subject to obsolescence? Perhaps. Certainly, efforts to update it and make it politically correct have proven futile.
But to their lasting credit, Rodgers and Hammerstein assembled and shined a spotlight on a previously unknown Asian-American acting community. Miyoshi Umeki, Jack Soo, Pat Suzuki, and legions of other Asian-American actors and actresses gratefully owed their careers to this imperfect point of origin. As Oscar put it, Flower Drum Song was their “lucky hit.” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s next hit wasn’t for the stage at all.
By the late 1950s, TV broadcasts attracted huge audiences. Dick and Oscar decided to tap the new medium’s possibilities by adapting Charles Perrault’s famous fairy tale Cendrillon, better known as Cinderella. There had been musicals shoehorned onto television before Cinderella. There had even been a few musicals written especially for television. But Mary Martin’s Peter Pan, broadcast two years before Cinderella, set the bar for TV’s potential.
Cinderella is the universally known story of a young woman who escapes her oppressive circumstances through a generous combination of luck, pluck, and magic, falls in love, marries the handsome prince, and lives happily ever after. What could be nicer?
In the English tradition, this story was often told as a pantomime, the broadly acted, slapstick-heavy, family-friendly holiday show—something Grandma could take the kids to see—in which audience participation was gleefully encouraged.
In the United States, Cinderella’s story found itself constantly being updated and recycled in musicals and nonmusical plays. This was especially true during the 1930s, when the happy-ending escapism resonated with strapped and trapped Americans everywhere. These rags-to-riches stories fittingly came to be known as Cinderella stories. Adult audiences craved them.
Now Oscar sought to two marry the old Cinderella story tradition with the new TV trend, hoping to appeal to all ages. He retained the eighteenth-century locale and the colorful characters but humanized and deepened them for adult consumption. This was still clearly a fairy tale, but it was, equally, a ninety-minute, “live” musical play.
Oscar’s adaptation followed Cendrillon closely. The king and queen are giving a ball to marry off their handsome son, but he’s diffident. Meanwhile, a trio of harpies—one stepmother and two witless step-sisters—are bossing around the poor stepdaughter Cinderella as they prepare for the ball and their shot at becoming princesses. After they leave, Cinderella ruminates on her hopeless servitude and fantasizes about her own coming out—replete with pumpkins turned into carriages, mice turned into horses, and a major wardrobe upgrade. Listening in, her fairy godmother introduces herself, proves she has bona fide magical powers, and fulfills all of Cinderella’s fantasies, but with the caveat of a midnight deadline. She arrives at the ball fashionably late and catches the eye and, with one dance, the heart of the prince. At midnight, just before the makeover spell unravels, she beats a hasty retreat, but leaves behind a glass slipper. The prince arranges a second casting call to find out whose foot fits the slipper. The mean trio tries to stop Cinderella’s fitting opportunity, but her godmother intervenes. Cinderella tries on the slipper. It fits. Wedding bells ring happily ever after. For the central role of Cinderella, Julie Andrews was perfect in every way.
Two years earlier, Dick had respected Andrews’s talents enough to spare her a Pipe Dream role and had advised her to shoot for the Eliza Doolittle role in Lerner and Loewe’s Pygmalion update, My Fair Lady. (Oscar and Dick had actually for years tossed around the idea of updating Pygmalion and had concluded that it wasn’t possible.) Andrews had gotten the role and become a huge star overnight. She was, of course, grateful for Dick’s advice.
In her strong, sweet, beautiful, straightforward way, Andrews, who was twenty-two at the time, seemed born to sing Oscar’s words and Dick’s music. Also, she had already played Cinderella in a traditional holiday pantomime, as a London teenager. Even though she was still starring in My Fair Lady at the same time, she’d need only three weeks and ninety minutes to nail down and deliver Dick and Oscar’s version.
In the days before computerized special effects, one scene was particularly challenging for live TV: Cinderella’s magical transformation from peasant garb to ball gown. The solution proved to be inspired. As the camera slowly, slowly panned down Julie Andrews’s torso to her feet, a squad of costumers, in a cloud of thrown glitter, changed her with a speed that would have done Fregoli proud. The camera then panned back up to reveal a princess—at which point her shoes were then changed into those all-important glass slippers. It was but one of many magically creative moments in the service of the demands of live television.
On March 31, 1957, in the Sunday time slot normally given over to The Ed Sullivan Show, 107 million people tuned in to watch. That’s three people watching every television then in America. Competing networks ran test patterns. Musical highlights included “In My Own Little Corner,” “A Lovely Night,” “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” and “Impossible; It’s Possible.”
Dick and Oscar’s score, unburdened by the gravitas of their earlier successes or the bland drift of their later flops, was nothing short of remarkable in the Indian summer of their careers. The live show was not without its gaffes, but the magic of the story swept them aside. Even today it’s popularity has not waned.
Chapter 17
ALL YOUR LIVING YEARS
Now that Peter Pan, both the play and television show, had run its successful course, Mary Martin was in the market for her next gig. Her friend Vincent J. Donahue (director of Sunrise at Campobello) screened Die Trappe-Familie, the popular German-language biopic depicting the astonishing, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction (and with better plots) life of Maria von Trapp. In the story, a widowed baroness becomes a nun-governess who adopts the family she works for and turns them into a professional folksinging act before heroically leading them in a flight out of an Austria impotently awaiting native son Adolf Hitler’s Anschluss.
Paramount had wanted to do the movie, and had even gone so far as to option Audrey Hepburn for the role of Maria. So now it was going t
o be a play with classical music … or was it? After much time and effort, releases were secured from the now far-flung seven Trapp children (who changed their name after their 1948 settlement in Vermont, where Maria owned a ski lodge cum music school). Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse had been hired to write the book, and the plan was to use the music the von Trapp family sang in real life. But Mary Martin, wise in the ways of the stage, wanted her good friends Oscar and Dick to write maybe a song or two for her, just to be on the safe side. This was a concept that Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t like for a variety of reasons: mixing old and new wasn’t a good idea, especially when the old was Mozart and Brahms. Who needs to compete with that? They were having enough trouble with Lerner and Loewe. And besides, they were busy with Flower Drum Song.
Fortunately Rodgers and Hammerstein counteroffered: they would write and compose all new music and coproduce. (Oscar was thrilled not to have to write the libretto.) In addition, The Sound of Music team would have to wait until Rodgers and Hammerstein were done putting Flower Drum Song together. The answer: We’ll wait.
But even before Flower Drum Song was finished, Oscar and Dick had sunk their teeth into what was becoming The Sound of Music. By August 1959, they were ready for rehearsals, with Theodore Bikel playing opposite Martin, who was preparing for her role by hitting the punching bag regularly so as to strengthen her diaphragm, and meeting with Maria von Trapp, who taught her how to properly cross herself and kneel, and how to play the guitar.
New Haven and Boston tryouts went well and Sound of Music arrived in New York with generous advance praise. The New York Times reported more good news: “Ticket purchasers flocked to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 West Forty-sixth Street near Broadway, yesterday morning when the ticket sale began for The Sound of Music, starring Mary Martin. The long line extended westward on Forty-sixth Street up to the Paramount Hotel, which is near Eighth Avenue. When the customers got within hailing distance of the box office, they were warmed by radiant heating devices, situated under the theatre’s wide marquee.”
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