Conclusion

Throughout his career, Weill remained optimistic that musical theatre could change the world for the better, all while reaching the broadest possible audience. He strove to write music that spoke to its time and place, but also endeavored to write music that possessed lasting impact and beauty. Although Rodgers and Hammerstein and their influence overshadowed Weill’s influence in his own lifetime and soon after, later Broadway figures like Hal Prince, John Kander, and Fred Ebb professed great admiration for Weill, and incorporated some of his innovations into their work. Weill’s legacy thus remains a part of Broadway to this day.

Alienation and Integration

This chapter tracks changing norms of gender and sexuality over the course of the 1940s in Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus (1943), and Love Life (1948). The first two link the notion of fantasy with an idealized feminine figure, but the onset of war changed the terms of that ideal. The third shows one hundred fifty years of U.S. history through one married couple using vaudeville numbers to illuminate the lessons of the narrative. This chapter also traces Weill’s evolving relationship with Rodgers and Hammerstein. Although a tremendous success, Lady in the Dark was overshadowed by Oklahoma! (1943), and documents around One Touch of Venus show Weill trying to respond quickly. Love Life counters the integration revolution of Oklahoma! with its self-consciously Brechtian separation of elements.

Oklahoma!

Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway on 31 March 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and today it is performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. When this book was first published in 2007, it offered the first fully documented history of the making of the show based on archival materials, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources. The present revised edition draws still further on newly uncovered sources to provide an even clearer account of a work that many have claimed fundamentally changed Broadway musical theater. It is filled with rich and fascinating details about the play on which Oklahoma! was based (Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs); on what encouraged Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Guild to bring Rodgers and Hammerstein together for their first collaboration; on how Rouben Mamoulian and Agnes de Mille became the director and choreographer; on the drafts and revisions that led the show toward its final shape; and on the rehearsals and tryouts that brought it to fruition. It also examines the lofty aspirations and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, and demonstrates just what made it part of its times.

Heading for Broadway

Although there was a complete libretto for what became Oklahoma! when the typical five weeks of rehearsals began on 8 February 1943, plus a number of the songs, there was still much work to do. The principal cast was fixed, including Alfred Drake (Curly), Joan Roberts (Laurey), Celeste Holm (Ado Annie), and Joseph Buloff (Ali Hakim), but others still needed to be recruited (Howard da Silva as Jud Fry). Some roles were expanded (Gertie Cummings) and others dropped (Lotta Gonzales, who was to have ended up marrying Ali Hakim). Act 1 was fixed early on, but act 2 was subject to constant revision even during the tryouts in New Haven and Boston (when the show was titled Away We Go!). In part this was due to problems of staging, but Rodgers and Hammerstein also remained unclear on the musical contents until the week before the Broadway opening, on 31 March 1943.

Contracts and Commitments

Theresa Helburn was initially uncertain about whether to treat Green Grow the Lilacs as a “cowboy play” with songs by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Tex Ritter, as something aspiring to higher artistic status (music by Aaron Copland or Roy Harris), or somewhere in between. Richard Rodgers also needed to deal with his longtime but collapsing partnership with Lorenz Hart. Even after Helburn had fixed on Rodgers and Hammerstein, in summer 1942, there were important decisions to be made about the director (eventually, it was Rouben Mamoulian), choreographer (Agnes de Mille, chosen because of her work on Copland’s Rodeo), and the casting of the show. The Guild approached various Hollywood stars (Deanna Durbin, Groucho Marx, Anthony Quinn, Shirley Temple) but took a different path in the end. No less troublesome was how to generate the large amount of money needed to get a musical onto the stage.

Setting the Stage

The pre-premiere publicity for Oklahoma! generated by the Theatre Guild fixed many of the themes that would dominate its reception history. The Guild had already established a pattern of creating musical versions of plays it had previously staged, by way of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess of 1935. Its executive director, Theresa Helburn, tried to persuade a number of Broadway composers to pick up the torch, including Kurt Weill (for Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, which later became Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel). She also saw some potential in Lynn Rigg’s Green Grow the Lilacs, first done by the Guild in late 1930. Riggs was one of a new generation of “regional” playwrights, and he drew on his own upbringing in Claremore, Oklahoma, for a work interweaving vernacular dialogue and cowboy songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, came from quite other theatrical traditions; anything they did would necessarily be very different.

From Stage to Screen

Oklahoma! was a surprising success on Broadway, and although the Theatre Guild considered other possible creative teams for new musicals, the now-sealed Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership proved hard to resist. A touring company was in place by late summer 1943, and Oklahoma! traveled internationally after the end of World War II (not least, to London’s West End in 1947); meanwhile, the Guild needed to replace cast members leaving one or other productions of the show. In 1953, Rodgers and Hammerstein bought the Guild’s rights to all three of the shows they had done under its auspices (including Carousel and Allegro). In part, this was to maximize their profits from intended film versions. The 1955 film of Oklahoma! took advantage of the new Todd-AO wide-screen process and location shooting to produce a vivid rendition of the show that, however, also needed to be followed, or resisted, in subsequent stage versions.

Small-Screen Singalongs

As the television industry struggled to establish its identity in the late 1940s, it looked across town to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and embraced the deep-rooted, highly lucrative, popular musical and its music as sources of inspiration. It turned to the familiar sounds of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein—music which fueled Broadway ticket sales and the recording industry. Focusing specifically on commercial television’s first decade, 1944–1955, this chapter explores how network programming sought to absorb both the sweeping popularity and cultural legitimacy of the musical genre and Broadway stage in pursuit of much-needed viewers and a more established cultural image or cachet. Further, it explores how visuals were transported from Broadway houses to small screens and how the first glimpses of Broadway on television would emerge as the medium set the stage for decades of small-screen singalongs.

The Sound of Music at Outdoor Summer Musical Theatres

This chapter visits three large, unique, outdoor venues for musical theatre in the summer: the Mountain Play in Mill Valley, California, the Zilker Summer Musical in Austin, Texas, and the Open Air Theatre at Washington Crossing, New Jersey, focusing on each theatre’s production of The Sound of Music. The Mountain Play has produced of one show each spring since 1913 in a 3,750-seat amphitheatre on the top of Mt. Tamalpais. The Zilker Summer Musical, established by the local recreation department in 1959, offers an annual free musical on a hillside that attracts thousands of spectators, many of whom would not otherwise see a play. The Open Air Theatre, which opened in 1964, presents thirteen shows each summer to more than eighteen thousand spectators. Each one of these venues, all located in old and well-established state parks, also boasts a complex history in relation to state and local government. Coincidentally, these three organizations produced The Sound of Music in successive years—the perfect show for an outdoor theatre. When Maria sings, “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” it was true: The hills are alive with the sound of music, though not actually the Austrian mountains where the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is set.

Lost in Translation

This chapter deals with the problematic movie adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel from a number of perspectives, including the team’s reluctance to allow their musicals to be adapted into movies too quickly and particularly the use of the new CinemaScope 55 widescreen process for making the movie; the R&H brand clearly had a role to play in the emergence of new, competing technologies, the chapter explains. The mid-1950s saw a war of technologies between the major studios, not only because of rivalry within the industry but also because of the decline in cinema audiences caused by the rise of television. Rodgers and Hammerstein were happy to jump on the bandwagon offered by CinemaScope 55 because it also meant a roadshow release to a limited number of theatres in major cities, with longer playing rime, souvenir programmes, higher admission rates, and the more proscenium-like screen proportions. Although the film was not a success, the chapter explains how technology became a huge player in the development of the screen musical in the 1950s.