A 1943 cowboy musical rewired Broadway storytelling
Composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II wrote Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Carousel, The Sound of Music and The King and I. Their shows and films earned 34 Tony Awards, fifteen Oscars and two Pulitzer Prizes, and their partnership has been called the greatest in 20th-century theatre.
The two first crossed paths in Columbia University’s Varsity Shows of 1920 and 1921, where Hammerstein, a judge, added songs to work by the freshman Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. For two decades they went separate ways: Rodgers and Hart wrote hits such as Pal Joey, while Hammerstein wrote operettas like Rose-Marie and, with Jerome Kern, Show Boat in 1927. When Hart’s drinking made him unreliable in the early 1940s, Rodgers asked Hammerstein to team up on an adaptation of Lynn Riggs’s play Green Grow the Lilacs, which Kern and Hart had each turned down.
The result, first tried out in New Haven as Away We Go!, reached Broadway as Oklahoma! on 31 March 1943. It had no star, and its songs and dances drove plot and character instead of interrupting them. It ran a record 2,212 performances, and Decca’s album of the cast made it the first musical with an original cast recording, now standard practice. The 1955 film was the first feature shot in Todd-AO 70 mm.
Carousel followed in 1945, one of the first musicals built around a tragic antihero, with You’ll Never Walk Alone among its songs. That year their only original film score, State Fair, won their single joint Oscar. South Pacific opened in 1949 and took the 1950 drama Pulitzer; they refused to cut You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught despite anger over its stand against racial prejudice.
The King and I arrived in 1951 with the little-known Yul Brynner, who later won an Oscar in the film. By August 1953 the team had four shows running on Broadway at once.
Source: Rodgers and Hammerstein
