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They created a string of popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s, starting what is considered the "golden age" of musical theater. Five of their Broadway shows, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music, were outstanding successes, as was the television broadcast of Cinderella.
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Richard Rodgers wanted to make a musical based on a stage play called “Green Grow the Lilacs,” but none of his usual lyricists wanted to work with him on this project…..and that is when he met Oscar Hammerstein. The two worked together to create the award winning musical “Oklahoma!”
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Richard Charles Rodgers was the second son born to physician Dr. William Rodgers and his wife, Mamie, on June 28, 1902. Rodgers learned to play the piano as a toddler, due to the fact that his parents loved Broadway musicals and would often play the tunes they had heard on the piano at home.
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Richard got to meet Hart in the winter of 1918. It was from that meeting that a friendship was started. This friendship turned into a collaboration that produced songs such as “Blue Moon” “My Funny Valentine” and “Isn’t It Romantic?”.
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Rodgers and Hammerstein worked together to take stories, plays, or poems, and turn them into musicals. They used their talents to create something that people of all ages would love. Even now, more than 70 years later, people still recognize their music and can sing it by heart.
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Oscar Hammerstein II in his first suit.
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Oscar in College at Columbia University
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Even though he grew up in a very musical family, Oscar’s grandfather desperately wanted him to do anything other than theatre. So, he decided to be a lawyer. He attended Columbia University, in New York, as a law student; however, he couldn’t stay away from the stage. He began acting in the school’s Varsity Shows which were very similar to the Vaudeville acts his family had done.
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It was through these shows that he met Richard Rodgers for the first time. In 1920, he worked with both Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to write a show called Fly with Me. Not long after, Hammerstein dropped out of college to become a full time writer and producer of musical theater.
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This week we have learned about Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. We have learned that they were able to work together to become an influential, innovative, successful, American, musical theatre, writing team.
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The beloved classic, “The Sound of Music” was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final production together. Oscar died 9 months after the Broadway premier. His legacy lived on through this final musical. The stage production, alone, won 5 Tony awards, including Best Musical, in 1959.
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“The Sound of Music” is based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp, and The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Set in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938, the musical tells the story of Maria, who takes a job as governess to a large family while she decides whether to become a nun. She falls in love with the children, and eventually their widowed father, Captain von Trapp. He is ordered to accept a commission in the German navy, but he opposes the Nazis. He and Maria decide on a plan to flee Austria with the children.
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When the real Maria von Trapp popped up on an episode of The Julie Andrews Hour, she told Andrews that the actress was "absolutely wonderful" in the film, but her yodeling was not quite up to par—which led to this little duet.
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