Theater: The Boys From Columbia

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A thousand years hence, when historians gravely chronicle the 20th Century U. S. theatre, diving now & then into their glossaries for light on “strip-tease” or “meat show,” they may wonder why, for a time, the theatre harped on human frailties— Follies, Vanities, Scandals—and then suddenly ceased to harp. They may perhaps write learned, ingenious essays describing the rise and fall of the morality play on Broadway, never dreaming that what they chronicled was the rise and fall of the musical show.

Post-War Broadway blazed with such names-in-lights as Ziegfeld, George White, Dillingham, Hammerstein, Carroll. Of a warm summer night buyers from the corn-belt flocked with their women to the New Amsterdam roof; winter after winter the Music Box ground out its medley of tunes.

It was an age of Ann Pennington and Marilyn Miller, Jerome Kern and Vincent Youmans, “When It’s Moonlight in Ka-lu-a,” “Rose-Marie, I Love You.” In the season 1924-1925, to pick a sample year, there were 46 musical shows on Broadway.

Then the radio went on the air and the cinemusical on the screen. Tastes changed, repetition cloyed, purses flattened. Gradually the number of musicomedies on Broadway dwindled. Last year there were six.

Of those six, the two biggest hits carried the names of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Indeed, during the past three years they have continuously—except for one lone week—had a smash hit on Broadway. Last week, their / Married An Angel, entering its fifth month, grossed over $28,681—a new high—and averaged 80 standees a performance. This week, road-show rehearsals start on I’d Rather Be Right after its summer holiday. A week or two hence rehearsals will start on a third Rodgers & Hart show, The Boys from Syracuse, which they are doing with Playwright-Producer George Abbott. Their tunes are whistled in the street, clunked out by hurdy-gurdies on the curb. The press, fumbling for a phrase to describe them, invariably ends with one that is glib but nevertheless significant: the U. S. Gilbert & Sullivan.

Their services to musicomedy can be exaggerated, but hardly their success. That success rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored. As Rodgers & Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon. They decided it was not enough just to be good at the job; they had to be constantly different also. The one possible formula was: Don’t have a formula; the one rule for success: Don’t follow it up. Their last five shows explain what they mean. Jumbo was circus set to music, On Your Toes a spoof at ballet, Babes in Arms about kids in a depression world, I’d Rather Be Right a rubdown of F. D. R., I Married An Angel a pure extravaganza that started in Heaven and ended in Radio City.

Three Men on a Farce. It follows that their new show, opening in November, will be another leap in a new direction: this time, over 300 years backward. On a train going to Atlantic City they hit on the idea of putting Shakespeare to music, decided to swipe his Comedy of Errors, the farce about the two sets of twin brothers and their women who couldn’t tell them apart, which Shakespeare himself swiped from the Menaechmi of Plautus (who in turn swiped it from parties unknown).

They are leaving the plot as they found it —”If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us”; but they have changed the title to The Boys from Syracuse. George Abbott, who has written the book, has pitched out every line of Shakespeare’s dialogue, because he likes his own better.

The raw, rowdy tale, as filled with Abbott wisecracks as an amusement park with lights, gives Rodgers plenty of chance for pedal in his tunes, Hart plenty of change for pepper in his rhymes. The score runs the whole anachronistic gamut from waltzes to hotcha; the lyrics vary from the smart patter of a prison song, listing the advantages of jail:

You’re privileged to miss a row

Of tragedies by Sophocles

And diatribes by Cicero

to the sly patter of a He and She song:

He told her this, on the very day he met her;

She said the wish is the father to the sport;

He built a house, in the nursery he set her ;

She helped the stork make an annual

report; to the forthright bang of:

I want to go back to Syracuse:

Wives don’t get divorces there,

The men are strong as horses there.

Cast for the roles of the Dromio twins are Comedians Jimmy Savo (Almanac Parade) and Hart’s brother Teddy (Three Men on a Horse, Room Service), two shrimps who look uncommonly alike. (Savo, 5 ft. 4 in., at present weighs 180 pounds, and all through October must diet as well as rehearse.) The Boys from Syracuse will be the first Rodgers & Hart show in which Teddy Hart has appeared. Said Brother Larry: “He had to be a star, and this is the first star part that ever fit him.” The Boys from Syracuse will be the second Rodgers & Hart show in which Rodgers & Hart have an investment; the other was I’d Rather Be Right.

The Boys from Syracuse is the 25th show that Rodgers & Hart have worked on together. Since they first met in 1919, when Hart was 23 and just out of Columbia, and Rodgers 16 and just going in, they have never done a stick of work apart. They met, and that decided it. Nor was there any stern parent storming about the house, or lean wolf hanging round the door, to menace their plans. “For the sake of color,” says Rodgers, “I should have been a singing waiter at Nigger Mike’s. Unfortunately, I was a doctor’s son and very well-fed as a kid.” Similarly well-fed. Hart was the son of a promoter.

Their first musicomedy was the Columbia Varsity Show of 1920 written in Rodger’s freshman year. Soon after Rodgers quit Columbia, and for five years the two of them plugged along, getting a few shots at Broadway, but no lucky ones. Then in 1925 the Theatre Guild, wanting some tapestries for its new theatre and a chance to give its understudies a workout, decided to put on an informal little revue, engaged Rodgers to write the music. Hart came in on the lyrics. The show, under the title of the Garrick Gaities, opened May 17, 1925, ran for 211 performances. People hummed Sentimental Me and Manhattan, music publishers enthusiastically bought from Rodgers & Hart the very songs they had sniffed at a year before, and Broadway producers yelled for shows.

Words & Music. Good taste and an unquenchably romantic point of view are the common denominators of most of the 1,000 songs Rodgers & Hart have written together. Larry Hart did not originate sophisticated lyrics. William Schwenk Gilbert was 48 years and many a smart jingle ahead of him. Richard Rodgers is not the first man to write melodies that get inside of people and do something to them. Franz Lehar could still give him a lesson in Schmalzmusik. But a song is words and music, and nobody ever fused words and music more effectively than Rodgers & Hart. When Rodgers’ melodic line expresses gaiety, sadness, humor, Hart’s lyrical line invariably complements and fulfills it. The lyrical slant may not be as sophisticated or clever as Cole Porter’s. The melody may resort to chromatic tricks that such a perfect craftsman as Vincent Youmans would reject as unsound. But a Rodgers & Hart song usually has the power of a single musical expression, which not even such a pair of individual talents as P. G. Wodehouse & Jerome Kern could ever quite pull off.

There is one further quality that Rodgers brings to his music which perhaps gives him the edge over such peers as Irving Berlin, Arthur Schwartz, Walter Donaldson, Kern, Youmans and great and gaudy Hollywood hack teams like Warren & Dubin and Robin & Rainger. Richard Rodgers is not only the master of a tonal palette filled with surprise and delight, but he is constantly at search for new forms across the known boundaries of his medium. The dream music for Peggy-Ann, and twelve years later for Married An Angel, the “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet music for On Your Toes, the march of the clowns in Jumbo, while probably causing Richard Strauss no alarm for his laurels, are imaginative and charming be yond the accepted standards of musicomedy music.

In the 13 years since the Gar rick Gaieties, Rodgers & Hart have livened Manhattan with such hits as Dearest Enemy, Peggy-Ann, The Girl Friend, A Connecticut Yankee, and the five-in-a-row of the last three years. They have livened the whole U. S. with such songs as My Heart Stood Still, Ten Cents a Dance, Blue Moon, I’ve Got Five Dollars, There’s a Small Hotel, With a Song in My Heart (Rodgers’ favorite composition), The Lady Is a Tramp. In the 13 years, their shows have played everywhere from Wales to New South Wales. And they themselves have gone, more than once, to Hollywood.

Grand Tour. They have, in fact, made the grand tour of Hollywood—Warner Bros., Paramount, United Artists, MGM. This assortment of alliances comes from their disliking to sign for more than a one-picture contract. Of their six pictures they, like the public, vote Love Me Tonight, with Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, the best. There pours out of them an old familiar tale—of a Hollywood cockeyed, imbecile, exciting, exasperating. The medium: marvelous. The methods: terrible. “Music,” they insist, “must be written for the camera. People can’t just stand around and sing songs.” For Rodgers, the usual experience was to hand in a score and, when the picture was produced, to find the score either missing or massacred. Once they worked for 15 months at M-G-M., and turned out only five songs. Says Rodgers: “In New York we often write five songs in one week. In three weeks we did the entire score of I’d Rather Be Right.”

According to Rodgers & Hart, Hollywood’s trouble is stupidity, not malice. “And you can no more resent stupidity in a movie director than in an elevator boy.” Headline boner where they were concerned came when, in the sheet music made for Mississippi, Swanee River was credited to “Rodgers & Hart.” They differ concerning Hollywood’s financial rewards. Hart believes they could make more money there than on Broadway, but prefers to forego it because he loves the theatre. Rodgers feels that a Hollywood income may be more certain but that only in the theatre can musicomedy writers really strike oil.

They have struck oil in the theatre often enough, but there have been a few spills. There was Betsy, the flop they did for Ziegfeld. “Ziegfeld should have been a movie producer. He didn’t know the first thing about music, yet he constantly butted in on the scores.” Ten Cents a Dance, the biggest plum they got out of another Ziegfeld show, Simple Simon, they “practically slipped in over Ziegfeld’s head.”

And there was Chee-Chee, the musicomedy made from Charles Pettit’s witty, bawdy Son of the Grand Eunuch, which Lew Fields produced in 1928. Lew Fields’s son Herb, who wrote the books of several of their early hits, was sold on the Son of the Grand Eunuch, talked Hart into liking it, the two of them talked Herb’s father, all three talked Rodgers. Rodgers believes it had the best score he ever wrote, that what killed it was the idea itself: “You just can’t talk about castration all evening. It’s not only embarrassing, it’s dull.”

Rodgers & Hart enjoy today that special blessing which befalls successful songwriters, of having money rain in from all sides—from royalties on shows, from the sale of shows to Hollywood and foreign countries, from sheet music, from gramophone records, from radio recitals, from having their music played by bands. On shows they get 6% of the gross, which means about $750 a week apiece if a show is a hit. Their biggest money-maker was The Girl Friend which played all over the world. In Hollywood they got $50,000 to $60,000 a movie. And from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which collects the royalties for public performances of copyrighted music, and grades royalties on a basis of the composers’ musical importance —Rodgers & Hart, like Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, are graded AA or tops—they each get about $18,000 a year. In a good year, their total income is upwards of $100,000. They insist they are not the biggest moneymakers in their field, though they have no idea who is.

Method and Madness. True to the best tradition of collaborators, Rodgers & Hart are not at all alike. Trim, afluent-looking, father-of-a-family Richard Rodgers (who at 36 is getting grey) supplies the method in their work: tiny, swarthy, cigar-chewing Bachelor Lorenz Hart (who at 43 is getting bald), the madness. Dick Rodgers lives with his attractive wife in a duplex apartment in Manhattan’s swanky East 77th Street, summers at smart Sands Point, Long Island, gives formal dinner parties, draws a bid to the famed Charles Shipman Paysons’ (the former Joan Whitney) Fourth of July parties, hobnobs with socialite Margaret Emerson, the Herbert Bayard Swopes, Noel Coward.

Hart lives with his mother, whom he describes as “a sweet, menacing old lady” on middle-class Central Park West, scowls at white ties, gives manners-be-damned, whiskey-by-the-case, all-night free-for-alls, gets bored with people and keeps picking up new ones. Rodgers takes the world in his stride; Hart is tempted to protest, fume, explain, deprecate — argues, for ex ample, with the desk-clerk of a Khartoum hotel because it does not carry Variety.

On the surface Rodgers, living by the clock, managing his own financial affairs and holding Hart in leash, seems to be the businessman of the pair. But Hart, who employs a business manager, who “runs a temperature” when he does not feel like working, who has to be yanked out of bed late in the day by a determined Negro servant girl, and who prefers to meet a question with a wisecrack rather than an answer, very likely knows to the fourth decimal place the dollars-and-cents value of his “temperament.” Aside from Jerome Kern years ago, Rodgers does not feel that anyone has influenced him musically. He hates swing, and so does Hart: “It’s old stuff. Benny Goodman only does better what Ted Lewis did years ago.” Both Rodgers & Hart hate having swing bands play their stuff—Hart because the subtlety, and even the grammar, of his lyrics is apt to be outraged; Rodgers because his melodies get buried.

Hart has never studied versification, never uses a rhyming dictionary. Rodgers disparages himself as a pianist, though he is extremely pleased at having once made some Ampico player-piano rolls of some of his song hits. Ampico still contributes something to his income. From time to time it sends him long, involved, incomprehensible royalty statements, with royalty enclosed. The enclosure: a ten-cent postage stamp.