From a Twenty first-century perspective, the template Oscar Hammerstein II helped set for the Broadway musical, integrating story, track, and dance, can appear old style. So, too, his depiction of the social order, with critiques of prejudice embedded in narratives wherein love conquers (virtually) all.
Hammerstein’s successors made their bones by subverting him. His protégé Stephen Sondheim’s sardonic takes on marriage and U.S. historical past had been radical departures in kind and tone. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s multiracial re-envisioning of America’s founders zoomed previous Hammerstein’s cautious polemics. Still, each males quoted Hammerstein slyly of their lyrics, acknowledging their debt.
In live performance together with his biggest collaborators, the composers Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers, Hammerstein wielded an affect that is still potent, as two new books clarify. Cary Ginell’s Carefully Taught: American History Through Broadway Musicals borrows its title from Hammerstein’s as soon as controversial South Pacific track about discovered prejudice. And Laurie Winer’s quirkily entertaining biography, Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical, makes the case for Hammerstein as a progressive thinker whose musicals are extra experimental and modern than we could notice.
Ginell’s e-book, primarily a reference instrument, goes broad moderately than deep. Beginning with credit, run dates, and different particulars, every entry feedback on a musical’s historic background, manufacturing historical past, and rating. The subtitle however, not all Ginell’s musicals deal in substantive methods with American historical past. And some by no means made it to Broadway. Two that didn’t—Adam Guettel’s haunting Floyd Collins, a couple of doomed cave explorer, and Michael Ogborn’s full of life Baby Case, on the Lindbergh kidnapping—premiered in Philadelphia, the place I used to be lucky sufficient to have seen them. The darkness of their subject material could properly have hampered Broadway transfers.
Ginell covers the obvious history-based musicals, together with Hamilton, 1776, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Ragtime, and Assassins. Kern and Hammerstein’s landmark Show Boat earns inclusion for its depiction of showboats on the Mississippi River, as properly its dealing with of racial prejudice. Rodgers and Hammerstein get two mentions: Oklahoma! for its examination of the territory getting ready to statehood, and South Pacific for coping with race in opposition to the backdrop of World War II’s Pacific theatre.
Other selections are extra idiosyncratic. Why embody Newsies, about an 1899 newsboys strike, and never Bonnie and Clyde? Why Li’l Abner for Cold War politics however not Annie for the Great Depression? Why Gypsy, in regards to the evolution of vaudeville into burlesque, however not Funny Girl, in regards to the comedian antics and travails of Fanny Brice?
Ginell’s cursory summaries work finest for lesser reveals. The Hamilton entry reveals the restrictions of his strategy. Not probably the most elegant of writers, Ginell makes use of the phrase “brilliant” 3 times in a single paragraph. He additionally credit Miranda, who was impressed by Ron Chernow’s biography, with sticking intently to historical past, however fails to notice that Hamilton’s principally constructive portrayal of its titular determine—a conservative defender of robust central authorities and the category establishment—has provoked heated debate.
Carefully Taught is especially rewarding to learn in reference to a music streaming service. Thanks to Ginell, I rediscovered John Cullum’s soulful, Tony-winning efficiency within the Civil War musical Shenandoah. I additionally revisited the cartoonish Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which I appreciated no higher than after I noticed it on Broadway.
A helpful addition to the Hammerstein biographical canon, Laurie Winer’s Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical indulges in periodic tangents on the expense of narrative coherence. But it does supply an instructive dive into the Hammerstein archives and contemporary interviews with theatre practitioners who knew him properly, notably Sondheim.
Broadway reveals, Winer writes, “defined a progressive American ethos, one that says if we are not all interconnected in some fundamental way, we are lost.” To Winer, Hammerstein typified that ethos. She acknowledges his character flaws, together with an inclination to be patronizing and even imply. She particularly dislikes his failure to face as much as the House Un-American Activities Committee within the early Fifties. She additionally obtains proof of an affair throughout his principally comfortable second marriage. “But he never stopped pushing himself to be better, as a human and as a craftsman,” Winer writes.
Raised as a coddled son, Hammerstein was the grandson of theatre impresario Oscar Hammerstein I (to whom Winer devotes appreciable consideration mid-narrative). The youthful Hammerstein misplaced his mom at 15, and “felt the necessity to steel” himself, he instructed an interviewer. While he dealt with his grief in a solitary method, Winer says he got here to imagine in “the need for community as a universal ideal.”
Winer probes the creation of his first masterpiece, Show Boat, for which Hammerstein wrote each e-book and lyrics and Kern composed the beautiful rating. Based on an Edna Ferber novel, it debuted in 1927, revolutionizing the shape and content material of the American musical. After Show Boat, Hammerstein endured what Winer calls a “decade-long cold streak” earlier than vaulting to even better success.
“The coming together of Rodgers and Hammerstein was a sweet relief for both men,” Winer writes. “They knew each other’s sensibilities well enough that their artistic connection was fully formed the moment it began.”
With Oklahoma!, their groundbreaking first collaboration, “the world broke open,” as Agnes de Mille, the present’s choreographer, later wrote to Rodgers. The present’s improvements included de Mille’s integration of dance into the storytelling. Winer admires director Daniel Fish’s latest blood-spattered reinterpretation of the present, calling it “a shift in emphasis” that underlined “how scapegoating helps cement communities.”
In the case of Carousel, Winer highlights the present’s problematic therapy of Billy Bigelow’s violent tendencies. She additionally discusses tussles over the authorship of South Pacific. Joshua Logan, the present’s director, helped Hammerstein with the e-book (based mostly on James Michener’s quick tales), however acquired much less credit score than he wished, and not one of the creator’s royalties he felt he deserved. Winer argues that Rodgers possible overruled the extra beneficiant Hammerstein within the matter. As she factors out, de Mille additionally nursed grievances in opposition to the duo, saying she felt “robbed for her work on Oklahoma!.”
Winer disapproves of what she regards as Hammerstein’s supine protection of his previous associations in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee, a requirement for passport renewal. Hammerstein, for all his liberal sympathies, was no Communist. But Winer condemns him, maybe too harshly, for failing to “protest the tenor and tone of the committee’s questions.”
She additionally pursues allegations of an affair, enterprisingly monitoring down the son of the actress Dora Jane Temple (often known as Temple Texas). He reveals that his mom was given a pinkie ring with the initials “OH” by Hammerstein.
Winer makes a minimum of two minor factual errors. She references “Main Line, Philadelphia,” when the Main Line truly denotes a gaggle of Philadelphia’s western suburbs, and misspells New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger’s identify. An even bigger subject is her discursiveness, which too typically shifts the main target away from Hammerstein to such issues because the literary repute of Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose antebellum novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin figures in The King and I).
In the tip, her portrait of Hammerstein as a person who “found grace in every role” is unexpectedly transferring. The lyricist’s bond with Kern was significantly robust and loving. And Sondheim means that with out Hammerstein and his spouse Dorothy, “I really don’t know where I would even be, if I’d even be alive.” In a letter to Hal Prince after his mentor’s dying, Sondheim writes, “He had a marvelous life, mostly due to himself, and he shows the way to live if we look—and the way to die.”
Julia M. Klein (she/her), a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, critiques theatre for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Forward. Her work additionally has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Nation, Slate, and different publications.
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