Rodgers & Hart :: Rodgers & Hammerstein :: Bio Details Richard Rodgers Rodgers & Hart Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) wrote their first shows together when both were still students attending Columbia University. After writing a series of musical comedies for the University's Varsity Shows and other charities, they made their professional debut with the song "Any Old Place With You," featured in the 1919 Broadway musical comedy A LONELY ROMEO. Their breakthrough came with the score for a 1925 charity show, THE GARRICK GAITIES, which introduced the classic valentine to their hometown, "Manhattan." From 1920 to 1930 Rodgers & Hart wrote an astonishing array of musical comedies for Broadway and London's West End. At their pinnacle the team was writing an average of four new shows a year, and among these were: DEAREST ENEMY, BETSY, PEGGY-ANN, THE GIRL FRIEND, CHEE-CHEE and A CONNECTICUT YANKEE.

In 1930 the team relocated to Hollywood, where they contributed songs and wrote the scores for several movie musicals, including the landmark LOVE ME TONIGHT starring Maurice Chevalier; THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT starring George M. Cohan; HALLELUJAH, I'M A BUM starring Al Jolson; and MISSISSIPPI starring Bing Crosby and W.C. Fields. They were lured back to New York by legendary Broadway producer Billy Rose in 1935 to write the songs for his circus musical spectacular, JUMBO. Their score introduced "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World," "My Romance" and "Little Girl Blue," and Rodgers & Hart were back on Broadway. From 1936 to 1943 Rodgers & Hart wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies, each of which seemed to top the one before in terms of innovation and box office success.

ON YOUR TOES (1936), BABES IN ARMS (1937), I'D RATHER BE RIGHT (1937),I MARRIED AN ANGEL (1938), THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE (1938), TOO MANY GIRLS (1939), HIGHER AND HIGHER (1940), PAL JOEY (1940), and BY JUPITER (1942) dazzled Broadway in spectacular succession, and collectively offered such classic songs as "There's A Small Hotel," "I Wish I Were In Love Again," "My Funny Valentine," "Where Or When," "The Lady Is A Tramp," "Spring Is Here," "Falling In Love With Love," "Sing For Your Supper," "This Can't Be Love," "I Didn't Know What Time It Was," "It Never Entered My Mind," "Bewitched," "I Could Write A Book," "Nobody's Heart," and "Wait Till You See Her." The partnership disbanded temporarily early in 1943 when Rodgers collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein II on OKLAHOMA!

The Rodgers & Hart partnership resumed with a revision of their 1927 musical comedy A CONNECTICUT YANKEE, and the new production (which featured six new songs including "To Keep My Love Alive") opened on Broadway November 17, 1943. Already ill at the time, Lorenz Hart died less than a week later. Richard Rodgers then pursued a career with Oscar Hammerstein II, and their collaboration over the next two decades resulted in the following musical plays: CAROUSEL (1945), ALLEGRO (1947), SOUTH PACIFIC (1949), THE KING AND I (1951),ME AND JULIET (1953), PIPE DREAM (1955), FLOWER DRUM SONG (1958) and THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1959). The team wrote one movie musical, STATE FAIR (1945), and one for television, CINDERELLA. (1957). Oscar Hammerstein II died in 1960.

Richard Rodgers continued to write for the musical stage for the rest of his life; his fortieth, and final, Broadway musical, I REMEMBER MAMA, opened on Broadway less than eight months before his death on December 30, 1979. In March of 1990, Richard Rodgers was honored posthumously with Broadway's highest honor when the 46th Street Theatre was renamed in his honor. In 1999, Rodgers and Hart were each commemorated on United States postage stamps. Rodgers and Hart's Dysfunctional Partnership - The Atlantic The Atlantic Rodgers and Hart's Dysfunctional Partnership Richard was disciplined and controlling. Lorenz was undisciplined, uncontrollable, and often drunk. But it worked. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty “It’s smooth! It’s smart! It’s Rodgers! It’s Hart!” It’s Cole Porter from DuBarry Was a Lady—the song, “Well, Did You Evah!”; the singers, Betty Grable and Charles Walters; the year, 1939.

When the song was recycled for Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the 1956 movie High Society, this snatch of Porter’s lyric was gone, but smooth, smart Rodgers and Hart weren’t, and more than half a century later they’re still with us, on scores of CDs and on iTunes, their most famous songs the meat and potatoes (or maybe the caviar) of countless jazz and cabaret artists. The year before Porter’s DuBarry, R&H had triumphed with both I Married an Angel and The Boys From Syracuse. A slew of other hit shows lay in the past, and Pal Joey was coming up, with By Jupiter on its heels. The quality of their work was at its peak, their fame and fortune at their height. Yet just a few years later, the partnership was over, and Larry Hart—at forty-eight—was dead, while Dick Rodgers, only forty-one, was launched on his even more triumphant partnership with Oscar Hammerstein.

The story of the irresistible and tragic Lorenz Hart, of his collaboration with the more grounded and less exuberant Richard Rodgers, and of the Broadway musical comedy from the twenties to the forties is the subject of Gary Marmorstein’s new soup-to-nuts biography of Hart, A Ship Without a Sail. The book begins at the end of the story—with Larry’s death, and the complicated and ugly fight over his will, and the way Teddy Hart, his beloved younger brother, and Teddy’s wife, Dorothy, were (or weren’t?) done out of their fair share of his money. There was a ruthless, perhaps dishonest manager, but to Marmorstein there was a more subtle villain: Richard Rodgers. Not that he grabbed money for himself—he was scrupulous in his business dealings—but, we’re told, “countering Teddy Hart’s accusation of undue influence on his brother, Rodgers tiptoed along the precipice of perjury.” In the lawsuits that followed, Marmorstein writes, “Teddy Hart lost one appeal after another. Rodgers secured what he’d wanted: control of the copyrights to those extraordinary songs.” So ended the exhilarating and rewarding collaboration of twenty-five years—in rage, in grief, and in court.

Larry Hart and Dick Rodgers were both bright Jewish boys from Manhattan who at one point or another went to Columbia, but there the similarity in their backgrounds ends. The Rodgerses were well-to-do, Dr. Rodgers a prominent physician who enjoyed an haute-bourgeois life—elegant apartment, good connections, conventional environment. Max Hart, Larry’s father, wasn’t prominent, elegant, or conventional. Known as the Old Man, he was short, coarse, with a thick accent, and his manners were less than genteel. (No one ever forgot that at least once, in a moment of impatience, he urinated out a window.) Max claimed he was in real estate, among other respectable things, but essentially he was a con man with strong Tammany associations, convicted once for grand larceny and another time for fraudulent use of the mails, but both times freed on appeal. He never appeared abashed, and Larry had fun telling people that his father was “a crook.” Fortunately for the family, Max was usually in funds, and he spent his money lavishly—mostly on them. Nothing was too good for Frieda Hart—Momma—a tiny, open-minded, open-hearted woman everyone adored.

And nothing was stinted when it came to Larry and Teddy: the best food, the best clothes, the best schools in town. Throughout Larry’s high-school and college years, the Harts’ house was an almost abnormally hospitable gathering place for all the pals the two boys brought home: an endless flow of food, drink, laughter, warmth, and talk that was both serious and provocative. Max, who liked a good laugh, a good meal, a good drink, and a good dirty story, would often join in and be the life of the party, while Frieda smiled and provided. As Frederick Nolan wrote in his excellent 1994 biography of Hart, Frieda “didn’t seem to mind [the gang’s] stripping her front parlor of furniture and turning the room into a sort of debating hall where politics, literature, poetry, and girls were hotly discussed until dawn.” No one else had a family like Larry’s. Yes, the Harts were disreputable, but they were generous and lively and fun.

Dick Rodgers, years later, would call them “unstable, sweet, lovely people.” Even as a young adolescent, Larry was writing lyrics and sketches, and Max, who had theatrical friends like Lillian Russell, took his older son’s precocious talent seriously. He had started taking Larry to theater and vaudeville when he was six, and the kid soaked it all up. He was also reading voraciously, mastering languages, writing for the school paper, going to a series of summer camps that specialized in putting on plays, skits, and revues. By the time he was in his twenties, he was in charge of the entertainment, staging such musicals as Leave It to Jane, one of the most popular of the famous Jerome Kern–P. G. Wodehouse–Guy Bolton Princess Theatre shows that he revered. From the first moment, there was no doubt that the two of them would work together: it was love at first sight. Larry was twenty-three, Dick not yet seventeen. All of this was an invaluable training ground and apprenticeship as Larry started moving into semiprofessional areas of the theater, most significantly the annual Columbia University Varsity Shows, which would run for a week in places like the Hotel Astor.

He got the job of adapting the songs for an English-language version of a German musical that played in Yorkville, its star named Mizi Gizi, its hit song “Meyer, Your Tights Are Tight.” Soon he was translating German plays for the Shubert brothers, at fifty dollars a week. Not that he needed to earn a lot of money—Max had more than enough, and Larry lived at home, sharing a bedroom with Teddy (which he went on doing until Teddy married, in 1938). While Hart’s career was inching forward, Rodgers was growing up. By the time he was nine he was composing melodies at the family piano—they just poured out of him. As a teenager, Dick was good-looking, athletic, sociable, interested in girls, and as conventional as the rest of his family. He provided tunes for a few amateur shows—fund-raisers for The Sun Tobacco Fund and the Infants Relief Society—and people were knocked out by his gifts. But he badly needed a writing partner, and in the spring of 1919 a friend had an inspiration: Larry Hart!

He led Dick to the Hart ménage, and after a few awkward moments, Dick started to play some of his melodies, at which point, as Marmorstein (unfortunately) puts it, “Larry’s ears pricked up like a startled deer’s.” Then Larry began to talk. As Dick remembered it years later, He knew a great deal about rhyming, about versification, and I thought he was wonderful. He felt that lyric writers didn’t go far enough, that what they were doing was fairly stupid and had no point, didn’t have enough wit, they were too cautious, and he felt that the boundaries could be pushed out a good deal. From the first moment, there was no doubt that the two of them would work together: it was love at first sight. Larry was twenty-three, Dick not yet seventeen. “I left Hart’s house,” wrote Rodgers a lifetime later, “having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend, and a source of permanent irritation.” The boys got an early break.

Through a pal from summer camp, Herb Fields, they came to know the Fields family—Herb’s sister, Dorothy, who would herself become a brilliant lyricist, and their father, Lew Fields, a onetime great vaudeville star who was now a major force on Broadway. By hook or by crook—or just family pressure—Fields picked up a very early R&H number called “Any Old Place With You” and stuck it in a current show of his. The show ran for only another half-dozen weeks, and the song went nowhere, but there they were, Dick just turned seventeen, on Broadway! It would be a long time before they were back. After six years of turning out (or churning out) songs and librettos for various amateur venues like the Park Avenue Synagogue—that one was called Temple Belles—they were in despair. Dick, despite unwavering support from his family, knew he had to start earning a living, and was seriously considering going into the children’s-underwear business. Larry was heading for thirty, apparently going nowhere. And then lightning struck.

In 1925, New York’s most prestigious production company, the Theatre Guild, decided to put on a low-cost revue to cover the price of a set of tapestries for its new theater. Through the Guild’s lawyer, who happened to be a patient of Dr. Rodgers’s, Dick and Larry were granted an audition with Theresa Helburn, one of its founders and directors. “When they came to the song ‘Manhattan,’ ” she would one day recall, “I sat up in delight. These lads had ability, wit, and a flair for a light sophisticated kind of song.” She gave the boys a $5,000 budget and a month to get The Garrick Gaieties on—for two performances only, on Sunday, May 17, 1925. Audiences and critics were so enthusiastic that the Guild scheduled half a dozen special matinee performances and, when its current Lunt-Fontanne show, The Guardsman, closed, turned the theater over full-time to The Gaieties. It ran for half a year, “Manhattan” was a smash, and Rodgers and Hart were on their way.

The next decade, despite the usual crises and disappointments that punctuate the life of the theater, was a fulfilling time of shows, movies, hit songs, and international recognition. Their first Broadway “book” show, Dearest Enemy, was a romantic comedy set during the American Revolution. A dozen or more shows in New York and London followed, plus some Hollywood musicals starring such performers as Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Al Jolson, and Bing Crosby. Life was easy on the Coast, and the money all too seductive, but their hearts belonged to Broadway. The roster of classic songs from this period includes “My Heart Stood Still,” “Blue Moon,” “With a Song in My Heart,” “Thou Swell,” “Dancing on the Ceiling,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” and “Lover.” The turning point came in 1935 with Jumbo, a colossal circus musical that was the idea of the egomaniacal showman Billy Rose, who took over the famous and failing Hippodrome, touted as the largest theater in the world.

(It took so long to get the theater ready and the show up and running that The New Yorker observed, “Well, they finally got Jumbo into the Hippodrome. Now all that remains is to complete the Triborough Bridge and enforce the sanctions against Italy.”) It had trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, clowns, Paul Whiteman, Jimmy Durante, and Rosie the elephant. Marmorstein remarks that numerous little boys were taken to Jumbo, one of them “the adopted son of vaudeville impresario E. F. Albee, a six-year-old named Edward” (actually, he was seven). Another of them was me—the first time I was ever in a theater. I can’t have been five, and all I remember is a vast space and, just maybe, an elephant. Balanchine reported that Hart “always appeared happy and laughing. He was so full of fun and energy.” He didn’t mention Larry’s heavier and heavier drinking. Jumbo was a spectacle.

On Your Toes, the boys’ next show (starring hoofer Ray Bolger, three years before his Oz Scarecrow), was a revelation, and a landmark in the history of the modern musical: the first to center on a ballet—the marvelous “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” the creation of George Balanchine. It was through Larry that Balanchine was added to the mix—and he stayed in the mix: Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, The Boys From Syracuse were to follow. Although the On Your Toes score included the usual hits, the music that made the biggest impact was Dick Rodgers’s score for “Slaughter,” which is still performed around the world as a stand-alone ballet. Balanchine and Hart chummed around together, and Balanchine reported that Larry “always appeared happy and laughing. He was so full of fun and energy, throwing his money around. From every pocket would come money and he paid everyone’s bills wherever he went.” He didn’t mention Larry’s heavier and heavier drinking, preferring to remember that it was Larry who taught him how to speak proper English. After Jumbo, everything changed.

From then on it was Larry and Dick who came up with the concepts for their musicals and were in control of them; they were no longer journeymen for hire. It was they who decided that next up after On Your Toes would be something completely different: a bunch of kids putting on a show—no stars, no sophistication. The score of Babes in Arms, another major hit, may be their greatest: “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” and the title song (most of which, in the great Hollywood tradition, were dropped from the Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney MGM musical). On they went: I’d Rather Be Right, with the great George M. Cohan playing FDR (whom he despised); I Married an Angel, with Vera Zorina as an angel who descends from heaven to Budapest to marry a banker; The Boys From Syracuse—Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, with one of the Dromios played by Teddy Hart; Too Many Girls, a football musical that launched the career of Desi Arnaz, whom Larry had come upon in a Miami nightclub called La Conga.

By now, every Rodgers and Hart show was an event, and they themselves were celebrated figures—on the cover of Time, subjects of a two-part profile in The New Yorker. They were overdue for a flop, and they got one: something called Higher and Higher, which bombed, leaving nothing behind except the plangent “It Never Entered My Mind.” But around the corner was Pal Joey, the most controversial, and influential, of all their shows. The book came from a series of stories John O’Hara had written for The New Yorker, about a seedy nightclub singer/emcee (Gene Kelly) and the women he seduces and abuses. It wasn’t a pretty story, and some critics, including the most important, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, found that its obvious virtues were undercut by its sordid story: “Although Pal Joey is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” When it was revived a dozen years later, it would be an even bigger success than it had been in 1940, and Atkinson took it all back, but by then, Larry, who had been devastated by that first review, was long since dead.

Pal Joey’s songs retain their power and charm: “I Could Write a Book,” a first-rate romantic ballad; “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” a mordant masterpiece and a triumph for Larry’s favorite, Vivienne Segal (she sang it in the revival too); and “Zip,” a sublimely witty take on the “intellectual” stripper Gypsy Rose Lee: Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn’t brilliant today. Zip! Will Saroyan ever write a great play? Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night. Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right. There would be one more big hit—back to the ancients with By Jupiter, reuniting the boys with Bolger, in their third show to be directed by Joshua Logan. But by now Larry was essentially gone, succumbing to acute alcoholism. He couldn’t or wouldn’t take on a whole new show, but when Dick decided to revive their 1927 hit, A Connecticut Yankee, he managed to come up with some new lyrics, including one of his very wittiest, “To Keep My Love Alive” (for Vivienne, of course).

When he was sober, his mind was as quick and clever as ever. But he wasn’t sober often. On opening night of A Connecticut Yankee he turned up at the theater drunk, ill, and noisy. Teddy’s wife managed to get him home to their place, but by morning he had vanished into the ugly November weather and couldn’t be found. That night, a pal, searching for him, came upon him sitting shivering in the gutter outside a bar on Eighth Avenue. Nothing they could do at the hospital helped—neither the oxygen tent nor penicillin, the new wonder drug that Eleanor Roosevelt interceded with the War Production Board to procure. It was over. Lorenz Hart was dead of pneumonia, and “Rodgers and Hart” was dead as well. The fun-loving, generous, ebullient guy everybody loved—“the most lovable, cuddly, honey bear,” Josh Logan called him—had self-destructed in the most painful and public way, a desperate, irresponsible drunk no one could help, whose death seemed a relief if not a blessing. How did Rodgers and Hart write their songs? This is how Larry characterized their work method to a reporter: We map out the plot.

Then Dick may have a catchy tune idea. He picks it out on the piano—I listen and suddenly an idea for a lyric comes. This happens often. On the other hand, I may think of a couple of verses that will fit into the show. I write them out and say them over to Dick. He sits down at the piano and improvises. I stick my oar in sometimes and before we know it, we have the tune to hang the verses on. It’s like that—simple! Did they ever quarrel? In his introduction to The Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Dick wrote that Larry loathed changing any word once it was written down. When the immovable object of his unwillingness to change came up against the irresistible force of my own drive for perfection, the noise could be heard all over the city. Our fights over words were furious, blasphemous, and frequent, but even in their hottest moments we both knew that we were arguing academically and not personally. I think I am quite safe in saying that Larry and I never had a single personal argument with each other. They had differences, though. At first, Larry was the mentor, the semipro; Dick was a schoolboy.

The age difference didn’t affect their work, but as time passed, their opposite approaches to life affected their relationship. Marmorstein writes: Larry Hart never had much use for Café Society, High Society, or the so-called Four Hundred, except as a dartboard, its members largely figures of fun. But the teenage Dick Rodgers was fascinated by that world, which remained exclusive, open only to the wealthiest Americans of the “highest” (i.e., invariably Caucasian, usually with English derivation) pedigree. His obsession with being classy never diminished. Max Hart described Dick’s apartment on West End Avenue as “like Frank Campbell’s Funeral Parlor, beautiful but dead!” In contrast, Larry, for all his erudition, reveled in the nightlife of Harlem and Damon Runyon’s Broadway—the “characters,” the bars, the seamy side. And he had no interest in money—it came and went, only important so that it could be quickly spent, usually on others. From the start, Dick was focused on finances and business arrangements; in his later, post-Larry, years, he not only controlled those R&H copyrights but owned and ran, with Hammerstein, major production and music companies.

Josh Logan’s theory was that Dick was “a bit embarrassed about the ease of writing music, as though it were too easy, too soft a thing for a man to do,” and was “only really happy making contracts, haggling about royalties, salaries or theatre leases.” It also seemed to Logan that Larry envied and therefore hated Dick’s rugged self-discipline, his ability to be punctual, efficient and to bring a show in on time. It was agony for Larry to sit down to work. Perhaps it was his fear of being less than perfect or just the painful fact of being Larry. One of Richard Rodgers’s strongest characteristics was his lifelong need to control, and unfortunately Larry Hart, from first to last, was uncontrollable, as chaotic in his work habits as his partner was disciplined. He was out drinking and partying late every night and never out of bed till midday, inevitably hungover; Dick was ready and eager to work hours earlier, frustrated by Larry’s no-shows. And then there were Larry’s broken promises about delivery of lyrics or dialogue. He was always remorseful, but what good did that do?

Dick, so earnest and methodical in his work habits, grew into an angry taskmaster, the bad cop, and he more and more resented having to be one. Larry bitterly referred to Dick as “the principal” with “a sour-apple face”; Dick referred to Larry as “my favorite blight and partner.” The partnership made in heaven was turning into a working hell. Yet the two men had loved each other. (Some people believed Larry had been in love with Dick from the start. The unambiguously heterosexual Dick, however, both before and after his marriage to the beautiful, elegant, and difficult Dorothy Feiner, was widely known for his devotion to the girls.) Although by the early 1940s Larry was disappearing for days at a time, his drunken binges more and more appalling, Dick proposed that they get to work on an offer from the Theatre Guild: turning the play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical. “I want you to have yourself admitted to a sanitarium,” he said. “I’ll get myself admitted, too. We’ll be there together and work together.

But you’ve got to get off the street.” As Marmorstein relates, paraphrasing Rodgers’s autobiography, Larry made it clear that he was not checking himself into any sanitarium—that he was on his way to Mexico. “Larry, if you walk out now, someone else will do the show with me.” “Anyone in mind?” “Oscar will write the lyrics.” “There’s no better man for the job,” Larry said. “I don’t know how you put up with me all these years. The best thing would be for you to forget about me.” He walked out of their meeting, leaving Dick—and the show that became Oklahoma!—behind. “Alone in the boardroom Dick sighed, the burden of tolerating an increasingly truant, irresponsible partner over the course of twenty-four years having been lifted in an instant. And then he wept.” This, at any rate, was Dick’s conveniently touching version of their parting. Years later, Rodgers would describe what Hart looked like to him at their first meeting. “His appearance was so incredible that I remember every single detail. The total man was hardly more than five feet tall.” He was unshaven, unkempt.

But that first look was misleading, for it missed the soft brown eyes, the straight nose, the good mouth, the even teeth and the strong chin. Feature for feature he had a handsome face, but it was set in a head that was a bit too large for his body and gave him a slightly gnome-like appearance. He also had a vigorously receding hairline, and he usually had a cigar stuck in his mouth. Gnome, pixie, troll, dwarf—that’s how Larry was seen by his world (Dick’s “shrimp” was affectionately mild). In public he was dignified about what he clearly saw as his deformity.

Balanchine remembered, “There was never any mention of his height, though he called the built-up heels in his shoes ‘the two-inch liars.’ ” “The cost of his brave face, though,” writes Marmorstein, “would emerge over … twenty-five years in dozens of lyrics that were less about being small than about what it’s like to feel small—to be dismissed, excluded, denied admission, and left standing out in the cold.” The generous, ebullient guy everybody loved—“the most lovable, cuddly, honey bear,” Josh Logan called him—had self-destructed in the most painful and public way. Certainly he believed that no one, especially no woman, could love him. Frederick Nolan tells us that Larry was asked by a reporter about his love life. “ ‘Love life?’ Larry replied. ‘I haven’t any.’ Then he was a confirmed bachelor? ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Nobody would want me.’ ” Yet there were women in his life to whom he was seriously attached and to whom he proposed.

Frances Manson was a story editor at Columbia Pictures who would later say, “I adored Larry … He was so dynamic and energetic, his presence was so magnetic, that I honestly never gave a thought to his being shorter than I was, though I am not at all tall.” Her reluctance to marry him came from her fear that she might end up drinking as much as he did. The popular young opera singer Nanette Guilford said, “He was absolutely adorable, and to know him was to love him. I loved him. But he never believed me. He didn’t believe any woman could fall in love with him.” Undoubtedly the woman he cared for most was Vivienne Segal, who was clever, funny, sexy, with a fiery temperament. (Larry once said, “I would rather be caught dead wearing a suit I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing than weather one of Viv Segal’s storms.”) One account concludes, Although everyone who cared for Larry believed him to be seriously in love with Vivienne Segal, it is our view that his admiration for her was an emotion that bordered on love but stopped short of sexual desire. Still, he proposed more than once, and more than once she turned him down.

Poor Frieda Hart—all she wanted was for her boy to settle down with Mrs. Right. One friend remembers sitting next to her listening to Larry singing “Have you heard, I married an angel” and Frieda whispering, “How I wish my Larry would marry an angel!” Instead, he shared a huge apartment with his angel mother until she died, only seven months before he did. It’s taken for granted now that to the extent Larry Hart had a consistently active sex life, it was homosexual. But discreet. Marmorstein speculates about the where and when of Larry’s encounters with other men. Turkish baths? A hideaway hotel room? He seems to have preferred rough trade, going off to Miami or Mexico and enjoying himself with beach boys.

(Balanchine reported to his assistant that on a trip the two men took together to London, he “got him out of brawls, when Larry would pick up sailors and get beat up.”) The homophobic Maurice Chevalier, for whom R&H were writing that unique movie Love Me Tonight, warned his young male assistant to stay away from Larry “or he’ll try to get into your pants.” According to Meryle Secrest, Rodgers’s most assiduous biographer, Hart brought an actor named Peter Garey home to the Hart apartment one night. Mrs. Hart “stood on the couch by the window and said, ‘If you go out with my son I am going to jump.’ ” (He did, and she didn’t.) A frequent guest at another louche Hart party reported, Larry was more of a voyeur. I can remember going to parties and seeing his eyes glittering, watching this orgy going on. When it came to sex, Larry left an awful lot to be desired. I was one of his boys, and I know.

It’s easy to hear sly echoes of homosexuality in Hart’s lyrics (there would certainly be none in Oscar Hammerstein’s), but although his great subject was love, he didn’t write much about sex. The following, from On Your Toes, is just about as explicit as he gets: Mother warned me my instincts to deny. Yet I fail. The heart is quicker than the eye! She said, “Love one time, Junior, Look at the Lunts!” I’ve fallen twice—with two at once. Passion’s plaything—that’s me, oh me, oh my! But at least I’m quite a beast. The heart is quicker than the eye! This was remarkably confessional for the Broadway of 1936. There were rumors about Larry while he was alive, but nothing about his sexuality ever appeared in print. One night in Los Angeles, in 1933, someone from a Hollywood trade magazine approached Dick at a party and said, “I’ve got to ask you something about Larry … Is it true Larry’s a fairy?” Dick grabbed him by the collar, Marmorstein recounts, and said, “I never heard that. And if you print it, I’ll kill you.” Time marches on.

According to the memoirs of Diahann Carroll—who in 1962 starred in Dick’s No Strings—one night he sighed to her, “You can’t imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for the little fag.” With his unfailing generosity, Larry embraced Dick at the opening-night party for Oklahoma! after its jubilant premiere and said, “This is one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen, and it’ll be playing twenty years from now!” It seems likely that he understood how everything was changing—that a new era of musical plays rather than musical comedies had begun, and that the heartfelt moralistic values of wartime America, and of Oscar Hammerstein, were the future. It’s as inconceivable that Larry Hart could have written “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” as it is that Hammerstein could have written “Zip.” “Hart,” said the director George Abbott, “was a much more sophisticated writer than the mature, assured, poised Hammerstein. Hart saw everything fancifully. His tongue was in his cheek, his poetry was light and airy. He saw love dancing on the ceiling.

Oscar saw it across a crowded room.” For all his erudition, Hart reveled in the nightlife of Harlem and Broadway—the “characters,” the bars, the seamy side. And he had no interest in money. The Rodgers and Hart shows have vanished (only On Your Toes and Pal Joey seem to be revivable; maybe A Connecticut Yankee), while the main Rodgers and Hammerstein shows are always with us. Hart would be a footnote to Broadway history if not for the songs. And they don’t die; they’re as viable today as they ever were, perfect conjunctions of words and music. (Words and Music, by the way, is the title of the ludicrous Hollywood biopic, with Mickey Rooney as Larry—well, they were both short—and Tom Drake and Janet Leigh as the Rodgerses.) They’re not as jazzy as the Gershwin songs, not as cannily grassroots as Berlin’s. They’re closest, perhaps, to Cole Porter’s in their combination of sophistication and melodic originality, but, as the songwriter Hugh Martin said, “Cole Porter was all about sex.

Larry was about love.” The musical-comedy expert Ethan Mordden put it another way: At bottom, the difference between Hart, the cleverest of the [era’s] lyricists, and Porter, the funniest, is that Hart saw the love plot in the shows as something worthy, almost unattainable, while Porter didn’t see love at all … The odd fact is that for all Hart’s jesting and all Porter’s lyricism, Hart was a romantic and Porter a satirist. He was also sad. And as time passed he grew sadder, and more cynical. Remember: his career takes off in 1925 with a paean of praise for “Manhattan,” and only fourteen years later he’s telling the world: Broadway’s turning into Coney, Champagne Charlie’s drinking gin, Old New York is new and phoney— Give it back to the Indians. His words reveal his self-doubt, his loneliness (“All alone, all at sea! / Why does nobody care for me?”), but he’s never angry, only rueful and disconsolate.

As he sums it up in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”: “The laugh’s on me.” It’s not for nothing that the playwright Jerome Lawrence named him “the poet laureate of masochism.” And yet … the joy in invention, the sheer energy of a song like “The Lady Is a Tramp”! Who else could have topped himself again and again, frisking from I like the free, fresh wind in my hair. Life without care. I’m broke—it’s oke to I like the green grass under my shoes. What can I lose? I’m flat! That’s that! to I like to hang my hat where I please. Sail with the breeze. I like the sweet, fresh rain in my face. Diamonds and lace, No got—so what? And who has written more tenderly of a beloved one than Hart does of his “funny valentine,” with his figure less than Greek and his mouth a little weak? Then a sudden naughty strike, as in these throwaway lines from a throwaway song called “Harlemania”: With the best of intentions, Folks who used to be nice Shake what nobody mentions, Not once, but twice.

He could be everything but corny. And he knew how good he was. “I’ve got a lot of talent, kid,” he told the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner. “I probably could have been a genius. But I just don’t care.” Lerner concluded, “Somewhere along the line, there obviously did come a time when the joy of his professional success became drowned in the lost misery of his handicapped life.” Gary Marmorstein has written a direct and ample—perhaps too ample—chronicle of that life, containing more professional detail and history than the average reader may want to absorb. Frederick Nolan’s book, now almost twenty years old, is less comprehensive, more fluent. Both biographers clearly have reservations about Richard Rodgers as a man; they both warmly celebrate Hart’s remarkable achievement; and they both express tremendous sympathy for Hart himself. And how could they not, given the combination of his generous and lovable nature with the tragic arc of his life?

Max Hart, Larry’s rambunctious father, died saying, “I haven’t missed a thing.” How sad that the last words of Larry himself—this man who gave so much pleasure to so many—were “What have I lived for?” UM School of Music, Theatre & Dance - Performances/Events - Syracuse (October 2005) Overview Press Release Program Photos Overview Confusion reigns as two sets of identical twins separated at birth end up years later in the town of Ephesus. In a tangled web of preposterous coincidences, wives mistake husbands, servants mistake masters, and townspeople mistake everything in a single hilarious day. Full of physical comedy and farcical mischief, The Boys from Syracuse is a delightful evening of misunderstandings and pandemonium that end in the magical reconciliation of family and true love. Long before West Side Story and Kiss Me, Kate, The Boys from Syracuse was the first musical to be adapted from the works of Shakespeare when it opened in 1938. This runaway Broadway hit combines the madcap antics of vaudeville with Rodgers’ rich melodies and Hart’s witty lyrics.

Featuring an impressive number of songs that are considered standards today, including “Falling in Love with Love,” “Sing for Your Supper,” and “This Can’t be Love,” The Boys from Syracuse is as entertaining, vibrant, and riotous as when it first took Broadway by storm. Press Release UM MUSICAL THEATRE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS THE ROGERS AND HART CLASSIC THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE ANN ARBOR — The U-M School of Music Musical Theatre Department presents the musical comedy The Boys from Syracuse by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors in a brilliant musical setting, The Boys from Syracuse plays Oct. 13 at 7:30 PM, Oct. 14 & 15 at 8 PM, and Oct. 16 at 2 PM at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. Directed by Brent Wagner, Associate Professor & Chair of the University of Michigan Musical Theatre Department, the department’s version of The Boys from Syracuse is a whirlwind of farce, comedy, and song. “Mistaken identity is one of the oldest forms of comedy,” Wagner said.

“And George Abbott (he wrote the show’s book) was known for his fast-paced comedy style. And this is no exception.” Considered one of Rodgers and Hart’s best musical efforts it’s the songs, according to Wagner, that have given The Boys from Syracuse its distinction. “The score adds a depth to the show that standard comedy doesn’t have,” He said. “The songs bring a sense of humanity and romance on top of the farce.” Written in the Golden Age of song writing, The Boys from Syracuse features classic songs like, "Falling in Love With Love," "The Shortest Day of the Year," and "You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea." Premiering in 1938 and based on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, The Boys From Syracuse was the first musical written based on a Shakespeare play. “I knew Larry (Lorenz Hart) would like the idea immediately,” Rodgers wrote in the New York Herald in 1963. “Anything that was novel or offbeat was always sure to interest him.

So early in 1938, when I suggested that we consider adapting a Shakespearean play into a musical, his eyes quickly lit up and I could almost see sparks coming out of his head.” Rodgers added that since this had never been done before they had unlimited possibilities for selecting a story. But for personal reasons The Comedy of Errors rose to the top of their list. “Larry had a younger brother named Teddy Hart, who was a very clever comedian. But the man he was always being mistaken for was another gifted comic, Jimmy Savo,” Rodgers wrote. “What about using The Comedy of Errors?’ Larry said, excitedly rubbing his hands together as he always did when a good idea hit him. ‘Teddy and Jimmy Savo would be natural for the twin Dromios.’” Ironically, both Teddy Hart and Jimmy Savo were cast in the original Broadway production. “I knew nepotism should be frowned on,” Rodgers added, “but I also knew this was an inspired idea.” After brief runs at the Schubert Theatres in New Haven and Boston, The Boys from Syracuse opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre on Nov. 23, 1938.

“I believe it will be regarded as the greatest musical comedy of its time...set to the most captivating, thrilling, humorous music and lyrics in the long and honorable history of Messrs. Rodgers and Hart, and it has a modern and swift moving book,” read the review in the New York Telegram after it opened. The Boys from Syracuse ran on Broadway for nearly 11 months (235 performances) before closing on Oct. 6, 1939. The Boys from Syracuse has returned to New York twice since—in 1963 Off Broadway at Theatre Four it ran for over 500 performances, and again to Broadway in 2002 at the American Airlines Theater. Joining Wagner on the artistic team are Sharon Halley (Choreographer) Guest Artist in Residence; Jessica Hahn (Costume Designer) Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Theatre & Drama; Cynthia Kortman Westphal (Music Director) Assistant Professor, Musical Theatre; Mark Gordon (Sound Designer) is a professional sound engineer and a staff member in University Productions; Arthur Ridley (Scenic Designer) Lecturer, Dept.

of Theatre and Drama and a staff member in University Productions; Andrew Fritsch (Lighting Designer) is a senior design and production student in the Dept. of Theatre and Drama. Click here to view The Boys from Syracuse program. The Boys from Syracuse | musical by Rodgers and Hart | Britannica.com The Boys from Syracuse musical by Rodgers and Hart THIS IS A DIRECTORY PAGE. Britannica does not currently have an article on this topic. Learn about this topic in these articles: in New Comedy ...the 18th century used characters and plot conventions that originated in Greek New Comedy. They were also used by Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Restoration dramatists. Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1938) is a musical version of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which in turn is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi and Amphitruo, which are adaptations of...

The Bomb-itty of Errors, And as the brothers grew up on opposite coasts One night they were visited by their father's ghost And he told his sons of their hip-hop history And said in a voice that was filled with mystery "One day you will find your missing link When you look in the mirror and see yourself blink." -- Prologue to The Bomb-itty of Errors Charles Anthony Burks and Chris Edwards as the two Dromios (Photo: Caroline Lewis) On the same night in London two shows open, uncannily both based on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and both hip-hop versions of the Bard. Sounds almost like a twinned event? I went to The Bombitty of Errors which has played off-Broadway and at the Edinburgh Festival. Ben Clover went to the Theatre Royal, in London's Stratford East to review Da Boyz, the hip-hop version of Rogers and Hart's musical The Boys From Syracuse which is a musical version of, you guessed it, William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.( Da Boyz ) . What's more we both had a great time! You can be assured that the show has transferred well from the United States. Link The Bomb-itty of Errors in NY .

The fantastic energy expended by all is a part of its charm. There are nods to London with a Beefeater with Shakespeare's head, Luciana's Flashdance Irish dancing and quips about cricket rather than baseball. The comedy is intact. I loved the messenger boy who cannot rhyme and the Rastafarian doctor's number "Rock the Nation". The final chase scene is a dazzling series of amazing costume and character changes. It seems to be half an hour longer than the show Les Gutman saw in New York but now has an interval. The four actors work amazingly hard. I hope they are earning more than the Equity minimum. The cast is all-American but none of them appeared in New York. Chris Edwards scene steals as a Dromio and Luciana in her blonde wig, think Daniella Westbrook meets Shirley Temple, and is a veteran of the show in Florida, Chicago, Edinburgh and Dublin. Edwards again, as the NY policeman chats up a member of the audience and flips back onto the stage athletically. ranney plays Luciana's sister, Adrianna, brilliant in a frock, this guy, well over six feet tall, frets over her husband's behaviour.

Charles Anthony Burke is the other Dromio and Joe-Hernandez-Kolski makes his Bombitty debut in London having been involved with a hip hop version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. What is more problematic is whether this original show will find its audience in London's West End. I suspect that going to the theatre is not a part of hip hop culture and I'm not sure school teachers will be brave enough to take their classes to something which is so obviously entertainment. They would be wrong. The Bomb-itty of Errors will speak to a younger generation the way Shakespeare's early comedy did in the sixteenth century. For a review of the original Bomb-itty in New York go here . The Bomb-itty of Errors Lorenz Hart (1895 - 1943) - Find A Grave Memorial New York County (Manhattan) New York, USA Lyricist. Born Lorenz Milton Hart in Harlem, New York, the eldest son of immigrants Max M. Hart and Frieda Isenberg Hart. He attended private schools and the School of Journalism of Columbia University for two years before being introduced to Richard Rodgers in 1918.

The pair began their long collaboration with contributions to Broadway musical �Poor Little Ritz Girl' in 1920. By 1925 they had their own show on Broadway, �The Garrick Gaieties.' Their subsequent Broadway successes included such classics as �A Connecticut Yankee' in 1927, 1935's �Jumbo,' 'Babes in Arms' in 1937, 1938's �The Boys from Syracuse,' which was based on Shakespeare's �Comedy of Errors,' and 1940's �Pal Joey.' Hart was uninterested in his partner's next project; �Oklahoma' and the pair had a falling out, leaving Rodgers partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II, and Hart struggling with alcoholism. Rodgers and Hart reunited to work together on a 1943 revival of �A Connecticut Yankee.' On opening night, Hart was thought to be behaving unusually. He disappeared from the theatre and remained missing for two days. When he was finally found in a hotel room, he was very ill. He was rushed to hospital, where he died three days later of pneumonia at age forty-eight.

(bio by: Iola) The LASALLE Show 2012 - Musical Theatre - The Boys from Syracuse - YouTube The LASALLE Show 2012 - Musical Theatre - The Boys from Syracuse Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Apr 17, 2012 THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE is one of the most beloved musicals by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Based on Shakespeare's THE COMEDY OF ERRORS this delightful comedy of mistaken identity features some of Rodgers and Hart's most memorable songs, including Falling in Love with Love, This Can't be Love, Sing for your Supper, The Shortest Day of the Year, and You have Cast your Shadow on the Sea.

Directed by Tony Knight, with Bronwyn Gibson (Musical Director), Tiffany Wrightson (Choreographer), Tolis Papazoglou (Set Designer), this production by LASALLE College of the Arts features the talents and skills of all three years of the BA(Hons) Musical Theatre programme, as well as students from the BA(Hons) Technical Theatre and Diploma in Performance programme. THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE is a magical and hilarious musical comedy is an event not to be missed -- a delight for all ages. Category Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse [08/31/16] August 31 at 7:00pm (rain date: Thursday, September 1 at 7:00pm*) Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse A Concert Performance—in music and dance By Boston Landmarks Orchestra In collaboration with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company Christopher Wilkins, conductor Peter DiMuro, choreographer ***This event is free and open to the public*** A landmark Broadway musical from the swing era is reborn on the Esplanade. The Boys from Syracuse, based on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, is often considered the finest of all Rodgers and Hart creations.

Familiar songs include ‘Falling in Love with Love,’ ‘Sing for Your Supper,’ and ‘This Can’t Be Love.’ This ‘concert performance with dancing’ marks only the 2nd professional performance of the inimitable big-band style original 1938 orchestrations. *If it also rains on September 1, this concert will be moved indoors to a rain location to be announced. Share this event Add to: 31/08/2016 19:00:00 31/08/2016 21:00:00 15 Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse August 31 at 7:00pm (rain date: Thursday, September 1 at 7:00pm*) Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse A Concert Performance—in music and dance By Boston Landmarks Orchestra In collabora...

DCR's Hatch Shell, Boston, MA 02108 Organizer Organizer e-mail false DD/MM/YYYY Reddit Event link: Shakespeare on Broadway - Off-Off-Broadway | Tickets, Reviews, Info and More Shakespeare on Broadway Hi, I was on TheaterMania.com and thought you might be interested in seeing this. Cancel Send Email WHAT IS IT ABOUT? The Shakespeare Society presents a 90-minute musical celebration of the American Musical Theater's adaptation of Shakespeare. Shakespeare on Broadway features Broadway stars Marin Mazzie (Kiss Me, Kate, Passion, Ragtime), Jason Danieley (The Full Monty, Candide, Floyd Collins), Tom Wopat (Glengarry Glen Ross, Annie Get Your Gun, 42nd Street), Richard Kind (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Producers, Tale of the Allergist's Wife), and Brian D'Arcy James (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Sweet Smell of Success) performing songs from such popular musicals (based on Shakespeare's plays) as The Boys from Syracuse, Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story.

Tony Award-winning director Jack O'Brien (Hairspray, Henry IV) provides commentary as scenes and speeches from The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet are paired with the incomparable songs of Rogers and Hart (The Boys from Syracuse), Cole Porter (Kiss Me, Kate), and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (West Side Story). Visit the Shakespeare on Broadway website:

Question: Which Rogers and Hart musical was based on Shaespeare's Comedy of Errors?
Answer: THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE