We'll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers & Hart

355 Pages·2015·3.278 MB·English

by  Dominic Symonds

WE’LL HAVE
MANHATTAN
THE BROADWAY LEGACIES SERIES
Geoffrey Block, Series Editor
Series Board
Stephen Banfield Jeffrey Magee
Tim Carter Carol J. Oja
Kim Kowalke Larry Starr
“South Pacific”: Paradise Rewritten
Jim Lovensheimer
Pick Yourself Up: Dorothy Fields and the American Musical
Charlotte Greenspan
To Broadway, to Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick
Philip Lambert
Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater
Jeffrey Magee
Loverly: The Life and Times of “My Fair Lady”
Dominic McHugh
“Show Boat”: Performing Race in an American Musical
Todd Decker
Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War
Carol J. Oja
We’ll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart
Dominic Symonds
W E ’ L L H AV E
M A N H AT TA N
The Early Work
of Rodgers and Hart
DOMINIC SYMONDS
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Symonds, Dominic, author.
We’ll have Manhattan: the early work of Rodgers and Hart, 1919–1931
/Dominic Symonds.
pages cm.—(The Broadway legacies series)
ISBN 978-0-19-992948-1 (hardback)
1. Rodgers, Richard, 1902–1979—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Hart, Lorenz, 1895–1943—Criticism and interpretation.
3. Musicals—United States–20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML410.R6315S96 2015
782.1'40922—dc23 2014016376
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For karen, verité, evelyn, and max, with love
(And because there’s a song about everything)

CONTENTS
● ● ●
List of Illustrations ix
Foreword by Geoffrey Block xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: “We’ll Have Manhattan” 3
1. The Summer Camps and Varsity Shows 28
2. The Breakthrough in Revue: The Garrick Gaieties
(1925, 1926) and Fifth Avenue Follies (1926) 64
3. The Rodgers and Hart Revolution: Dearest Enemy (1925) 87
4. Pleasing the Producers: Herbert Fields, Lew Fields,
and The Girl Friend (1926) 109
5. A London Odyssey: Lido Lady (1926), One Dam
Thing after Another (1927), Ever Green (1930) 124
6. Big Fish: Peggy-Ann (1926), Ziegfeld, and a Flop
Called Betsy (1926) 167
7. A Commercial Success: A Connecticut Yankee (1927) 185
8. Castration and Integration: Chee-Chee (1928) 210
9. Coping with the Crash 238
Epilogue: The End of an Era 264
Notes 267
Bibliography 307
Credits 315
Index 321

ILLUSTRATIONS
● ● ●
Figure T.1 Timeline of new Rodgers and Hart shows
opening in New York and London, 1925–1931. xxi
Figure I.1 Larry Sobel’s likeness of Rodgers and Hart in
the Morning Telegraph, June 12, 1927. 8
Figure 1.1 Similarities between the opening lines of
“Any Old Place with You” (1919) and
“Manhattan” (1923). 31
Figure 1.2 The cast of The Peace Pirates (1916), showing
Oscar Hammerstein II in blackface (far left),
and next to him, Lorenz Hart in drag. 41
Figure 1.3 Rodgers’s chromaticism in “Inspiration,” from
Fly with Me (1920). 43
Figure 1.4 Motivic material in the verse to “Lady Raffles
Behave,” creating a nervy, dialogic quality. 47
Figure 1.5 Running order of songs in Poor Little Ritz Girl
before (left) and after the Rodgers and Hart
material was culled. 49
Figure 1.6 “Herbert Richard Lorenz”: Herbert Fields,
Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (1927). 57
Figure 1.7 Timeline of Rodgers and Hart’s amateur
and professional engagements, 1919–1925. 63
Figure 2.1 Words following music in “Gilding the Guild”
from the Garrick Gaieties (1925). 70
Figure 2.2 Program cover to the Garrick Gaieties (1925). 76
Figure 2.3 Program cover to Fifth Avenue Follies (1926). 77
Figure 2.4 Intertextual references in the pastiche “It May
Rain,” from the “Rose of Arizona” section of the
Garrick Gaieties (1926). In this section, spot
Jerome Kern’s “Till the Clouds Roll By” and Louis
Silvers’s “April Showers.” 84
Figure 3.1 Promotional flyer for Dearest Enemy, showing Helen
Ford in her risqué opening costume: nothing but a barrel. 96
Figure 3.2 References to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience in
“Full Blown Roses.” 99