"Gotta' sing! Gotta' diagnose!": a postmortem examination of Rodgers and Hammerstein's medical musical Allegro.

IMAGINE GOING TO THE THEATER TO SEE A MUSICAL PAGeant about a young physician’s professional trials and tribulations, a play that explores the decisions he makes about how he practices medicine and where; the meanings and obligations of the physician’s social contract; and even the risks of medical error. Let’s extend this fantasy by hiring a trendsetting team of producers, an equally accomplished choreographer and set designer, and an army of professionals to mount the production. And while we are at it, we should invite Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, one of the greatest writing duos in the history of musical theater, to write the words and music. As it happened, if you were a theater devotee almost exactly 60 years ago, all you had to do was walk over to the Majestic Theatre on Manhattan’s West 44th Street to see such a production. Opening night seats for Allegro, a now obscure medical musical, were the hottest tickets of the 1947 Broadway theatrical season. Heralded on the covers of Time and Life, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s creative success or failure was heatedly debated for weeks by a teeming ant farm of gossip columnists, critics, and show biz beat reporters across the nation. Featuring a cast of 78 and an orchestra of 35, Allegro was entirely moderne in concept, boasting a set consisting of multiple curtains, rotating flats, and lantern slides, a singing “Greek chorus,” and 4 integrated ballet scenes depicting and commenting on the life of Dr Joseph Taylor Jr, from his birth until age 35 years. The historian’s task of re-creating this version of “Everydoctor” is somewhat vexing. The first flop to flow from the golden pens of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Allegro ran on the Great White Way for only 9 months (314 performances), and its huge cast and staggering weekly budget precluded any profit. There is no film version of the play or even a complete cast recording (the extant version contains only 10 of Allegro’s songs and none of the choral narratives). Rarely performed today, the libretto and score are nevertheless easily acquired at any decent library, and the more scholarly will find a fairly evocative collection of photographs of the original production safely reposing at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. These documentary remnants, plus a modicum of dramatic imagination and, if you are fortunate, the talents of a friendly pianist, immediately demonstrate an insightful exploration of the difficult navigation between the Scylla and Charybdis of demanding professional careers and personal choices. The play opens on the day of Joe’s birth and, soon enough, the audience is introduced to his father, a rural general practitioner struggling to build a modern hospital for his impoverished and underserved patients. As the father picks up his newborn son, he mellifluously declares the infant to be his clinical successor. In subsequent scenes, the audience is treated to lilting descriptions of Joe’s developmental milestones, from his first steps to matriculation into college. There are, however, foreboding hints of a series of increasingly wrong choices to come. These discordant tones begin to peal loudest during his courtship and marriage to a beautiful young woman, Jenny Baker, who derides Joe’s aspirations to become a country practitioner and pressures him into finding more lucrative ways to make a living. Indeed, Jenny exhibits a dedicated selfishness that literally induces a fatal myocardial infarction in Joe’s morally superior mother; all the while, Jenny seduces Joe into abandoning the family business of doing the most good where most needed. After several sexually charged ultimatums from Jenny, Joe leaves his father’s practice for the glittering lights of the big city. There, amidst the distracting whirl of parties, soliciting donors to fund new patient pavilions, ceremonial ribbon cuttings, and making a mint giving vitamin injections to the worried (and wealthy) well, Joe discovers that his bored and neglected wife is having an affair with the chairman of the hospital trustees. Disillusioned but undefeated, Joe, in true Broadway musical fashion, manages to resolve his ambivalences and stresses just before the fall of the closing curtain. Turning down a promotion to become the youngest ever physician-in-chief of his prestigious city hospital, Joe instead opts for what Rodgers and Hammerstein believed to be the purer life as lone practitioner in the small town where he was born. In the show’s final moment, Joe’s shocked employer plaintively asks what he should inform the newspapers regarding Joe’s inexplicable declension of the coveted position of physician-in-chief. One powerful hospital trustee suggests telling the press that Joe is “sick.” Joe tunefully counters them both, “Tell them I’m just getting well,” as the libretto’s stage