page_title: Allegro (musical)
section_title: Rehearsals and tryouts
hierarchical_section_title: Allegro (musical) / Rehearsals and tryouts
caption_attribution_description: English: Richard Rodgers (nearest to camera) and others at a rehearsal for Allegro.
context_page_description: Allegro is a musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, their third collaboration for the stage. Opening on Broadway on October 10, 1947, the musical centers on the life of Joseph Taylor, Jr., who follows in the footsteps of his father as a doctor, but is tempted by fortune and fame at a big-city hospital.
  After the immense successes of the first two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel, the pair sought a subject for their next play. Hammerstein had long contemplated a serious work which would deal with the problems of the ordinary man in the fast-moving modern world. He and Rodgers sought to create a work which would be as innovative as their first two stage musicals. To that end, they created a play with a large cast, including a Greek chorus. The production would have no sets; props and projections served to suggest locations.
  After a disastrous tryout in New Haven, Connecticut, the musical opened on Broadway to a large advance sale of tickets, and very mixed reviews. Agnes de Mille, the choreographer of Rodgers and Hammerstein's previous Broadway productions, both directed and choreographed the work.
context_section_description: The duo hired choreographer Agnes de Mille to direct—a move between two theatre functions which was unusual at the time.  De Mille had been the choreographer for the dances in Oklahoma! and Carousel, designing ballets which disclosed the characters' psychological states to the audience.  She had been concerned about the cohesion of the script as she received it from Hammerstein.  When a few days before rehearsals began, she asked Hammerstein what the show was about, the lyricist replied, "It's about a man not being allowed to do his own work because of worldly pressures."  De Mille answered, "That's not the play you've written.  You haven't written your second act."  Hammerstein replied, "But we're already committed to the theatre in New York."
  De Mille faced an immense task. Instead of conventional sets, locations were suggested by platforms, images projected onto backdrops, and lighting—there were 500 lighting cues, at the time a Broadway record.  There were forty stagehands, needed to shift sixty partial sets, with objects moved onto the stage by a semicircular track hidden by an elaborate series of curtains. According to de Mille biographer Carol Easton, "Allegro was a leviathan of a show, on a scale exceeding the grasp of any individual."
  Rehearsals took place in three New York locations, for principals, singers, and dancers. The production contained 41 principals and over a hundred dancers.  De Mille also choreographed the dances, which were both extremely complicated and provided the framework for the scenes which made up the show.  During the dances, Joe learns to walk, falls in love, goes astray, and then gets back on the proper track.  De Mille used adults in children's clothes for the dances when Joe is a child; since there were no actual children on stage to provide scale, the illusion worked.  The dance which accompanied "One Foot, Other Foot" was based on de Mille's own experiences in watching her own son Jonathan learn to walk.
  Sondheim later expressed his view of de Mille's directing, calling her "a horror.  She treated the actors and singers like dirt and treated the dancers like gods ...[she was,] I think, an extremely insensitive woman, an excellent writer, and a terrible director, in terms of morale, anyway.  That was my first experience of bad behavior in the theatre."  However, Rufus Smith, who played the minor role of the football coach, stated, "Never again in my life will I experience what it is like to stop a show cold, by doing exactly what she taught me".  The immense job of directing the play finally proved too big for de Mille, who stated "I can't do the new dances and the new songs and the new book," and Hammerstein stepped in to direct the dialogue.  According to Rodgers biographer Meryle Secrest, at this point the cast was up in arms over de Mille's treatment of them.  James Mitchell, one of the dancers in the production, later stated that de Mille was better at directing dancers than actors, as actors come to the stage with preconceived notions about how to play a part, and dancers do not.
  The first tryout, in New Haven, Connecticut, did not go to plan. During the first act, William Ching, playing Joseph Taylor, Sr., was singing "A Fellow Needs a Girl" when the scenery wall began to collapse, forcing him to hold it up until the stagehands noticed. Dancer Ray Harrison caught his tap in a track in the stage, tore the ligaments in his knee and was carried from the stage, screaming. Lisa Kirk, the first Emily, fell into the orchestra while singing "The Gentleman Is a Dope".  She was catapulted back onto the stage with no pause in her singing, to great applause by the audience.  Sondheim remembered,
   Next day in the New York Herald Tribune ... Billy Rose, of all people was saying, "A star is born."  Next night she comes back, came to the same point in the song, and starts to fall, and the entire audience gasps because they'd all read the Herald Tribune.  She recovers quickly, they all sigh, and she gets another ovation.  Oscar came backstage at the end and said, "You do that a third time and 
caption: Rodgers (nearest to camera) and others at a rehearsal for Allegro
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