bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
“What Is a Richard Rodgers?”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It is indeed unfortunate that subsequent generations remember Joshua Logan (1908-1988) primarily as the man responsible for the outrageous colors that marred the 1958 film version of South Pacific. From the late-1930s through the mid-1950s Logan was one of Broadway’s most distinguished directors and producers with numerous major play and musical credits, including On Borrowed Time and Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), Morning’s at Seven (1939), This Is the Army (1942), Mister Roberts (1948), Picnic (1953), Fanny (1954), and Middle of the Night (1956). His association with Rodgers began in 1938 with the Rodgers and Hart hit musical, / Married an Angel. Over the next few years Logan would serve as co-librettist as well as director for Higher and Higher (1940) and as the director of Rodgers and Hart’s last musical, By Jupiter (1942). Before co-producing, directing, and co-authoring the original stage production of South Pacific (1949), Logan directed another hit show, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946), co-produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein one year after Carousel. In Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life Logan describes his role in the creation of the South Pacific libretto over a ten-day period on Hammerstein’s farm, and relates in painful detail how, in his view, the Rodgers and Hammerstein corporate juggernaut deprived him of what he felt to be his legitimate right to share an author’s copyright with Hammerstein. At the same time he blamed Rodgers for these decisions, Logan acknowledges that Rodgers did more to establish and maintain his career than any other man. Logan’s anguish, hurt, and anger loomed so large after his experience with South Pacific that he “politely refused” co-authorship and direction for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s next show, The King and I.
“There’s Hope for Everyone”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Theatre Guild shows created new stars (Alfred Drake, Joan Roberts, Celeste Holm in Oklahoma!, John Raitt and Jan Clayton in Carousel). South Pacific began with stars already in public orbit, Broadway’s lustrous Mary Martin (1913-1990) and the famous bass Ezio Pinza (1892-1957) crossing over after several decades of leading roles with the New York Metropolitan Opera and London’s Covent Garden. By the time Rodgers and Hammerstein asked Martin to play Nellie Forbush, she had long since made her auspicious supporting debut in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me (1938) with the song that would provide her autobiography its title. Several years later, she attained stardom in the title roles in One Touch of Venus (1943) and in the first touring company of Annie Get Your Gun in 1947 (an Irving Berlin musical produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein the previous year). After playing Ensign Forbush for a little more than two years, Martin would go on to create the title role in Broadway’s Peter Pan (1954) and Maria von Trapp in R & H’s The Sound of Music (1959). In yet another claim to fame, Martin was also the mother of Larry Hagman (1931-), known to millions as J. R. Ewing in the long-running television series Dallas (1978-1990).
The Art of Adaptation
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
From The Cradle Will Rock {1937) to / Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962) Lehman Engel {1910-1982) occupied a prominent and ubiquitous place as a Broadway conductor. Among his many recordings are the first (nearly) complete studio cast recording of Porgy and Bess in 1951 and a studio cast recording of Pal Joey in 1950 that is frequently credited as the impetus behind the successful revival two years later. In the 1960s Engel gained new distinction as a leading Broadway historian and developer of new talent in his role as a teacher at New York University, the American Musical and Dramatic Theatre Academy, and as the director of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. Since the largest share of the responsibility for a show’s success rests on the librettist-and since today’s exorbitant production costs seriously diminish the beginner’s opportunities for learning through doing, it is essential that potential librettists learn everything possible from the growing list of musical-show models-as well as from the formidable catalogue of failures.
“The Musical Stage”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) shared some of Bentley’s disdain for musicals that sing songs of social significance, including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s message for racial equality in South Pacific, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” Also like Bentley, but in contrast to Atkinson, Nathan, a Smart Set co-editor with H. L. Mencken beginning in 1914 and an early advocate for the serious dramas of Eugene O’Neill and Sean O’Casey, proudly maintained a double standard when it came to the American musical. According to Nathan, the Broadway musical is doomed to fail when it tries to emulate higher artistic realms such as the Metropolitan Opera. As an advocate of “the lighter stage,” Nathan vigorously defends Hammerstein’s sentimentality and Rodgers’s relentless tunefulness and praises the team for “abstaining from an indulgence in the social significance deemed by some of their colleagues as desirable in lending a bit of weight to their shows” Marines [Seabees] is unquestionably offensive to the English critics, who like to think, however much they may pretend the contrary, that if it were not for their own soldiery, whether on land or sea, or in the air, we would long ago have been speaking German or Japanese as our national language. In the third place, such a key song number as “You’ve Got To Be Taught To Hate” [“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”] strikes them as being quite as violative of the show’s flow as it struck the New York critics. In the fourth place the appropriation of the Madame Butterfly theme in the secondary love story of the young naval lieutenant and the Tonkinese girl occurred to them just as it did to some of our critics. And, in the fifth place, though they liked the Rodgers score, they probably, as the local critics did not, here and there recognized some of its inspirations as, for example in the “Bali Ha’i” song, Saint-Saens’ second concerto in G minor. (Saint-Saens has surely stood some of our composers in good stead, as witness, among others, Gershwin and his “Rhapsody In Blue.”)
“Moving in the Direction of Opera”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The present printed selection from the best-selling The Joy of Music concludes what was originally a telecast on the American musical delivered by conductor, composer, pianist, and educator Leonard Bernstein (7918-1990). First seen on the Omnibus series, October 7, 1956, the lecture was broadcast only two months before the debut of his own Candide (December l, 1956) and less than a year before West Side Story (September 26, 1957). After exploring the continuum of musical theater from the variety show to Wagnerian music drama (with revue, operetta, comic opera, opera buffa, opera comique, and grand opera somewhere in between), Bernstein presents the history of the American musical as a period of growth from primitive Mozart came along. In 1750, the big attraction was what they called the Singspiel, which was the Annie Get Your Gun of its day, star comic and all. This popular form took the leap to a work of art through the genius of Mozart. After all, The Magic Flute is a Singspiel; only it’s by Mozart. [Ed. Bernstein inserts a note here to “compare with related ideas in ‘Whatever Happened to That Great American Symphony?,’ page 40.” We are in the same position; all we need is for our Mozart to come along. If and when he does, we surely won’t get any Magic Flute; what we’ll get will be a new form, and perhaps “opera” will be the wrong word for it. There must be a more exciting word for such an exciting event. And this event can happen any second. It’s almost as though it is our moment in history, as if there is a historical necessity that gives us such a wealth of creative talent at this precise time.
A Few Favorite Things about Rodgers with Hammerstein
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Alec Wilder (1907-1980), the author of the American Popular Song, a widely acknowledged classic in the field, was himself a composer of numerous works for stage, orchestra, and chamber music and whose songs were sung by Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra and performed by the Benny Goodman and Jimmy Dorsey bands. In the introduction to the Rodgers chapter in this widely quoted volume (see also his remarks on “My Heart Stood Still” selection in Part I), Wilder puts his critical cards on the table: “Of all the writers whose songs are considered and examined in this book, those of Rodgers show the highest degree of consistent excellence, inventiveness, and sophistication.”
“The Nicest Guys in Show Business”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Cleveland Amory’s profile of the pair who “not only have written the best musical comedies but have also changed the whole concept of the musical theater: is a worthy representative of the deferential media treatment Rodgers and Hammerstein received in the 1950s.* After quoting Rodgers’s defense of “sweetness and light” and Hammerstein’s defense of “sentimentalism,” Amory revisits such familiar territory as their “slow and painstaking” planning of a show and Rodgers’s speed in setting Hammerstein’s lyrics. Future journalists and historians would modify Amory’s depiction of Rodgers’s disposition as “placid” or the assertion that he was a nonsmoker and only an occasional drinker, but the profile nonetheless fairly attempts to address the familiar story of their interconnected careers and their lives in the last year of collaboration. Readers also learn that Hammerstein, to refute the accusation that he was the “nicest guy in the theater,” let a press agent know he had stolen a radish from a blind man (at a dinner party) and that Rodgers takes his croquet games more seriously than practically anything else in life outside of the theater. Amory concludes by discrediting three “outright canards” about the team: 1) “that Rodgers is the businessman, Hammerstein the poet”; 2) that they have made more money than is good for them; and 3) “that they are luck/’ To the first two canards Amory notes that neither Rodgers nor Hammerstein sees himself as a businessman and that both men generously donate their time and money to many organizations and good causes and have not allowed their wealth to lead to social or artistic complacency. In responding to the final canard Amory deftly shifts the topic from luck in the theater to personal luck and cites the misfortune of Rodgers’s cancer and Hammerstein’s gallbladder operations and a son’s divorce.
“Introduction” to Richard Rodgers
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
According to Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th ed., 1991), David Ewen (1907-1985) has “published more books on music and edited more reference publications than anyone else in the 20th century (some 85 in all).” His many American musical theater subjects include the dated but still useful New Complete Book of the American Musical (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) and books on Irving Berlin (1950), Jerome Kern (1953), George Gershwin (1956; rev. 1970), Leonard Bernstein (1960), and Cole Porter (1965).
‘You Can’t Force It”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
n 1938 Winthrop Sargeant (1903-1986) published one of the first serious book-length treatments of jazz: Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (third ed., Da Capo, 1975). The remarkable Rodgers profile that follows appeared midway through Sargeant’s tenure as music critic of The New Yorker (1947-72). He begins by crediting Rodgers as “a continuous and restless innovator” at the rebellious forefront of revolutionary chang s in the modern American musical. In addition to descriptions of Rodgers’s physical presence, personality, lifestyle, and a survey of his career from childhood to a pending creative union with librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, Sargeant ruminates seriously on the nature, uniqueness, and significance of Rodgers as a composer of original, distinctive, and memorable melody “designed to fit a given dramatic situation.” In Sargeant’s view, Rodgers’s melodic variety “is probably greater than that of any other Broadway composer.” Without denigrating the classical tradition, he also thoughtfully defends Rodgers’s inherent gifts and the creation of tunes, “fully as beautiful as any melody in ‘classical’ music: For Sargeant, “it is yet to be proved that melody is not the most inspired and the most fundamental ingredient of all music worthy of the name.” And if musical comedy is “not as lofty an art as opera,” “writing for it demands great talent-a talent that sometimes surpasses that of the operatic composer.”
“The Plot Against Musicals”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Increasingly, as Rodgers continued his work without Hammerstein, audiences had the opportunity to see and compare multiple eras in the career of a living legend. The selection that follows contains three parts: l) a review of a successful Off-Broadway 1963 revival of Rodgers and Hart’s 1938 classic, The Boys from Syracuse; 2) a comparison between Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!-in 1968 on the eve of a single concert performance in Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center to commemorate its 25th anniversaryand a pretentious new musical, Here’s Where I Belong (“burdened with substance and shackled to seriousness”), based on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, another production destined to last one night (but in this case an unplanned one-night stand); and 3) a review of the first performance of Rodgers’s new musical Do I Hear a Waltz? All three pieces are by Walter Kerr (1913-1996), widely considered one of the most distinguished theater critics of his generation, first with the New York Herald Tribune (1951-66) and then with the New York Times until his retirement in 1983. In the first review Kerr offers effusive praise for Hart’s sophisticated lyrics and Rodgers’s “inappropriately perfect” and invariably “unexpected modulations” in songs like “The Shortest Day of the Year:’ After extolling the virtues of the perennially fresh Oklahoma! at the expense of the short-lived and still-born Steinbeck adaptation, Kerr’s final review rejects the cognitive dramatic dissonance of Do I Hear a Waltz?, a show in which Rodgers’s excellent musical-comedy songs must be made to “carry the evening when the evening isn’t a musical corned.
The Perils of Producing Rex
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Respite his independent artistic achievements, Richard Adler (1921-) remains best known as the co-composer-lyricist, who along with Jerry Ross (1926-1955), created a double-header of hits in the mid-1950s, The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955). Twenty years later, he produced a Rodgers musical based on King Henry VIII (Rex) that lasted only forty-eight performances. The excerpt below chronicles this failed attempt (see also Mandelbaum’s remarks that follow). With disarming honesty Adler tells his readers what went wrong and what he learned. Perhaps the major mistake in retrospect was the decision not to accept the financial terms of director-choreographer Michael Bennett, who would soon be developing and directing the phenomenally successful A Chorus Line. Adler also relates how “collaboration with a legend [Rodgers] had a negative effect upon Sheldon Harnick,” the lyricist of Fiorello!, She Loves Me, and Fiddler on the Roof, when he tried to emulate Hammerstein rather than be himself. Another problem was the deleterious offstage behavior of the brilliant Nicol Williamson, who played the title role. As with most failures, “major book problems” proved insurmountable. All things considered, Adler concedes that he should have closed the show in Wilmington. He also realized, “in hindsight, that Elizabeth was the fascinating person about whom the musical should have been written in the first place:’
“Introduction” to Musical Stages
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Mary Rodgers (1931-) is the composer of the perennially performed musical Once Upon a Mattress (1959) and several works of popular fiction designed for younger readers, most notably Freaky Friday, both the original 1972 novel and the screenplay to a successful Disney film with Jodie Foster in 1977. At the time of her father’s death, his elder daughter informed well-wishers that her personal loss was no greater than theirs, since her father’s single-minded devotion to the theater precluded all else, including his presence as a warm and loving daddy. Introducing the 1995 reprinted edition of Musical Stages fifteen years later, Mary Rodgers discusses, perhaps for the first time in print, her father’s unhappiness and chemical depression. She also writes of Rodgers’s love of collaboration and his successful partnership with two contrasting geniuses, Larry Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. At the end of this touchingly honest remembrance, written, according to Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization President Ted Chapin, after she had rejected his offer to provide an introduction, Mary Rodgers publicly expresses feelings privately denied fifteen years earlier: “Granted, he was hardly your run-of-the-mill father, but of course I loved him. A lot. So there!” My father wrote in our living room with the door wide open. He would request that we, my sister and I, not sing or whistle or otherwise distract him, but aside from that, it was a rather public happening. A morning person, an enviably quick study, and cheerfully businesslike about his work, he’d go to the piano at nine and was usually through by ninethirty.
“Jerome Kern: A Tribute”
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
For composers such as Rodgers and Gershwin who wanted Broadway to adopt a more vernacular musical language, Jerome Kern {1885-1945), “the first man to break with European theatre tradition,” was a model and an inspiration. In the tribute that follows, Rodgers recalls with love and “a feelng of real gratitude” seeing Very Good Eddie (1915), a Princess Theater show, “at least a dozen times in one season;’ when he was about thirteen. Three years later, it was a recording of the song “Babes in the Wood” from this show that Hart played on the day he and Rodgers met, and it was their mutual appreciation of Kern that helped forge a deep and lasting bond between the new collaborators.
“The Right to Revive” (or “Revive and Let Live”)
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Rodgers’s ‘The Right to Revive” offers a spirited defense of a practice that continues to be viewed as a symptom of theatrical decline rather than health. In doing so, Rodgers addresses future critics who disparage the recently added, vigorously competitive, Tony Award category of Best Musical Revival. Among the recent winners in this category are revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel in 1994 and The King and I in 1996. Rodgers notes that stock and amateur companies were contractually prohibited from performing works during their initial Broadway runs-it remains common today for shows in Broadway revivals to prohibit regional and collegiate productions-and considers it another vital sign that 340 stock and amateur performances of Oklahoma! appeared the previous year. In contrast to most critics then and now, Rodgers argues that new productions of earlier shows (such as On Your Toes, which was to open the next day) “might even encourage a beginner to stay in the theatre;’ since their return would assure new talent that the best shows do not necessarily vanish. All lasting works of an art nature are continually in a state of revival. This is true of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, The Man with the Hoe, Brahms’s First Symphony, Falstaff, and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is revived by the persons who travel in vast numbers to see it every year. Musical comedy is entitled no less to be revived from time to time, simply because it is considered a lesser art, provided that what is being revived is a good example of that art. Actually, being more easily understood by a greater number of people than the more serious works, it might be entitled to more frequent revivals. Onstage, tastes change, mores are different, so that where language is understood, as opposed to grand opera, the life-revival span is usually limited; but The Merry Widow, a fine fantasy-romance with a lovely score, was greeted happily once more only a few years ago.
Reminiscences of Richard Rodgers
Authors: Block Geoffrey 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The longest selection in the Reader is excerpted from an extended interview with Kenneth Leish, arranged in twelve parts (392 double-spaced pages of typescript and a two-page index of names). Although only the first four parts include dates, It is clear from references to current productions at places like the Music Theater at Lincoln Center that the final portions of the interview did not extend much beyond Summer and Fall 1968.* In a portion of the Reminiscences not reprinted here readers learn that the press suppressed Hart’s excessive drinking as well as his homosexuality, not because Rodgers threatened the publisher of a scandal rag when confronted with questions about Hart’s sexuality, but “because the newspaper people were all crazy about him” (p. 200}. Also in this section Rodgers discloses that For the archivally curious this footnote offers topics, dates (when provided in the interviews), and page numbers for each section: (I) Rodgers’s current activities (December I4, I967), I-39; (2) Background (December I9, I967), 40-84; (3) Producing Avanti and The Garrick Gaieties through A Connecticut Yankee (February 2I, I968), 85-u8; (4) I927-I932 (March I, I968), II9-43; (5) I932-I936, I44-67; (6) Working with Hart, I68-203 [marked on the title page “closed during lifetime”]; (7) Pal Joey and Oklahoma!, 204-46; (8) State Fair and Carousel, 247-78; (9) Allegro and South Pacific, 279-307; (IO) The King and I, Victory at Sea, and Me and Juliet, 308-36; (II) Pipe Dream and The Sound of Music, 337-62; (I2) After Hammerstein, 363-92.
A Truly New World
Authors: Steinberg Ted 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It was perhaps the most ill-timed expedition in the history of exploration. In 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English courtier and navigator, recruited 117 people—men, women, and children—to venture to the New World under the command of John White. Their destination: a spot of land roughly ten miles long and two miles wide off the coast of North Carolina now named Roanoke Island. White put the settlers ashore and a few weeks later returned to England to find supplies and additional recruits for the venture.
Conservation Reconsidered
Authors: Steinberg Ted 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the ranchers who watched the blizzard of 1887 wipe out his herd of cattle was Theodore Roosevelt. In the early 1880s, Roosevelt, a New Yorker, built a ranch in North Dakota’s Badlands, stocked it with animals, and hired two cowboys to oversee his venture. In the spring of 1887, he headed west to check on the status of his 85,000-dollar investment, arriving in the Little Missouri valley only to find that death had beaten him there. He saw cattle carcasses—23 in just a single little spot—and found his once glorious herd reduced to just “a skinny sorry-looking crew.” The ground itself was in no better shape. “The land was a mere barren waste; not a green thing could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the country looked as if it had been shaved with a razor.”