Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviews Todd Purdum about his new book, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution. Before there was Rodgers& Hammerstein there was Rodgers & Hart. When a dissipated lyricist Lorenz Hart could no longer work, composer Richard Rodgers teamed with Oscar Hammerstein. Their first play, Oklahoma!, which opened on Broadway in 1943 and played for an unprecedented 2,212 performances.

It was considered a breakthrough largely because of it’s opening. “Almost all musical comedies of that era opened with a big choral number to satisfy late-comers, the rustling playbills, to get them adjusted, they would have a display of pulchritude across the footlights with dancing girls and boys singing a big ensemble number,” Purdum explains. “But Oklahoma! began the same way Green Grow the Lilacs [the 1931 play on which it was based]  did, with a woman churning butter and a cowboy singing offstage. And it was so quiet it landed like a bomb.”

The simple story: which of two guys was going to take a girl to a party, was very simple and naturalistic, but Agnes de Mille’s choreography gave it an avant-garde feel, propelling the story forward with ballet that explored the characters’ innermost feelings and fears. “It was received in 1943 much the way Hamilton was received today, unlike anything in the field,” says Purdum, a political reporter for Vanity Fair and Politico.com who just happens to love the works of R&H.

Oklahoma! was also the first Broadway play to issue a cast soundtrack, according to the author. And that was only one in a long list of classics from the duo. Carousel, South Pacific, The Sound of Music followed. The book is no doubt wonderful, but hearing Purdum discuss it with strategically inserted song excerpts is a treat.