Channel Flipping Leads to Rabbit Hole
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
You will be surprised to learn that Mary and I stayed home on New Year’s Eve. Surprised because most couples our age were probably out drinking and dancing the year away. Our friskier friends, the 70-year-olds, were likely at home and engaged in romantic acrobatics of which most teenagers and circus performers can only dream.
Quite by chance we stumbled on a two-hour tribute to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein on PBS. And it was really by chance since Mary was looking for a hockey game or online poker and I was flipping through the channels trying to find a panel of scholars discussing the possibility of finding some hint of intelligence in American politics – obviously a hopeless pursuit.
The PBS special is a classic. I was a little surprised I had never heard of most of the performers until I realized late in the show the tribute had been staged in London’s Royal Drury Lane Theatre in 2024 and all but a few stars were British. That surprised me since I hadn’t realized there were, or ever had been, singers from the United Kingdom other that the late Vera Lynn and the ever popular George Formby (who can forget his ‘Mister Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now that sold almost fifty records in the 40’s?)
As everyone over fifty knows, Rodgers and Hammerstein were a legendary award-winning theatre writing team in the 20th century. They won 42 Tony awards, 15 Academy awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, two Grammys and two Emmys and created over 40 musicals and musical scores in their careers.
What I want to write about is partly their musical accomplishments, but also something about the men themselves. Not Richard Rodgers so much, since I imagine just about any jerk can write music. I’ve seen sheet music and although I can’t read it, I have seen little kids of six or seven who could. They were chop-sticking away on pianos (even girls if you can imagine) and if they can do it I would think anyone can. But writing the words, now that’s where the talent lies.
This morning I was in the shower humming away at a song from The King and I. There is a wonderful number from that musical, Hello, Young Lovers that was sung by Deborah Kerr, co-star of Yul Byrnner in the movie version, and I began to wonder about Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist, and what sort of person he must have been to come up with the words, You fly down the street on a chance that you meet and you meet, not really by chance. The man obviously understood us more romantic souls.
I said had but it really should be has since his words will be around as long as The King and I is performed and it will be for years to come.
If you are looking for something to read some day, other than my columns, although I don’t know why you would want to, look up Rodgers and Hammerstein on the internet, and in particular the Wikipedia article on The King and I and how and why they came up with this wonderful show. It is a fascinating and complicated look into the making of a Broadway musical.
To start with, I had no idea that the two of them did not sit side by side on a piano bench, Richard plunking away at the keyboard with one finger while Oscar jotted down the lyrics on a scratchpad. Not so, the words came first, long before Richard wrote the music.
You knew I was being a jerk when I said any jerk can write music. This jerk can’t. The whole process is, as King Mongkut said in the musical, ‘a puzzlement’ and beyond me.
Obviously they worked together planning The King and I based on Margaret Landon’s novel, Anna and the King of Siam, which is a fictionalized version of Anna Leonowen’s book about her experiences as the governess of the King’s children. (There were dozens of the little nippers, Mongkut was a busy boy. His baby bonus cheque every month would almost pay Orillia’s snow plowing bill – or better yet, pay for a much-needed vasectomy – for him, not me.)
The score, the story, the people involved, the organization and the collaboration needed to build a musical is a major project and begins long before the show is cast.
Richard and Oscar didn’t want to do this one in the beginning because the book didn’t seem quite right for a musical, but the Rex Harrison/Irene Dunne 1946 film adaptation of her novel did, and the rest, they say, is history.
I wonder if Dorothy Hammerstein and Oscar’s home life mirrored the love-life of the couples in the musicals. Did Oscar take her shopping every Saturday morning in A Surrey With a Fringe On Top? Were their hills Alive with the Sound of Music? Did they first meet when he saw her Across a Crowded Room or did he see her in a bikini one day in June when she was Bustin, Out All Over?
On the other hand it could have been those Honey Buns?
Trust me to bring sex into it.
(Image Supplied)
