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by Meryle Secrest
How Rodgers and Hart reinvented the musical in five crazy years — with hits like The Boys from Syracuse
Between 1936 and 1940, the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart produced eight shows, three of which they wrote or co-authored in addition to providing the songs, and only one was not a resounding success. Even their triumphant days of the twenties had not surpassed this record in quality, such a profusion of wit, melody, and fecundity of imagination. They were established in the AA class of songwriters with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), along with Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Ira Gershwin, as "smart" songwriters, i.e., those who had managed to please the multitudes while also satisfying more discriminating tastes.
They were also subjects of newspaper and magazine profiles in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Time magazine wrote a cover story in 1938, erroneously claiming that the pair had written something like a thousand songs. Hart was not the first to have written sophisticated lyrics, nor was Rodgers the first to have fashioned melodies with a powerful emotional effect; but they were unusual, nevertheless, for the degree to which their words so perfectly matched the underlying feelings of gaiety, pathos, or humor implicit in the melodies: a Rodgers and Hart song had "the power of a single musical expression." In this five-year burst of creativity Rodgers and Hart demonstrated not only the extent to which their talents had merged seamlessly and with considerable expressive power, but the wisdom of their joint resolve not to repeat themselves. Jumbo (1935) had been a circus musical; On Your Toes (1936) took on classical ballet; and Babes in Arms (1937) was about the adolescent children of vaudevillians who put on a show of their own. I’d Rather Be Right (1937) was played against politics during the Roosevelt administration, and I Married an Angel (1938) was a fantasy about a man who literally gets his wish, with unexpected results. The Boys from Syracuse recast Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Too Many Girls (1939) was set on a college campus; Higher and Higher (1940) was a farce about a maid who marries a millionaire; and Pal Joey (1940), for the first time, took an antihero as its central character, in this case a nightclub singer.
At this stage they were referring to themselves as musical dramatists. In their view, the advent of the radio and phonograph had made deep inroads into what was once the highly profitable sale of sheet music. This limited, but did not end, the careers of composers who could write single ballads but had not attempted the greater intellectual challenge of fitting words and music into a plausible sequence. Enter the musical dramatist, who confines himself to Broadway and centers each song around a situation in the plot. Time and again, Rodgers and Hart had started full of hope, only to be defeated by the sordid commercial realities: "Most authors of musical-comedy books and most producers had a theory that any sentence implying the presence of the moon, the month of June, or a feeling of frustration was a sufficient cue for a boy and girl to walk into a spotlight and sing about love," Margaret Case Harriman wrote. But as the years went on Rodgers and Hart were edging ever closer to their belief that a musical could be as coherent and ultimately satisfying as a well-crafted play.
Their words so perfectly matched the underlying feelings of gaiety, pathos, or humor implicit in the melodies: a Rodgers and Hart song had ‘the power of a single musical expression.’
On a trip down to Atlantic City to start writing I Married an Angel, Rodgers and Hart were more interested in talking about writing a new musical based on a Shakespeare play. The novelty appealed to them, but they also had in mind the fact that Hart’s younger brother, Teddy, was making a name for himself as a comedian (having appeared in two of George Abbott’s farces, Three Men on a Horse and Room Service). The family likeness was strong, but Teddy Hart’s resemblance to another comedian, Jimmy Savo, was even more striking, so much so that he was continually being mistaken for him. Two funny men who could pass for twins was too good an opportunity to miss, and after some thought Rodgers and Hart agreed upon a musical that would take the greatest possible liberties with The Comedy of Errors. However, it would make use of Shakespeare’s basic concept, i.e., having twin servants, Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse, who wait upon twin masters, Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse, giving endless possibilities for comic misidentifications.
They proposed The Boys from Syracuse to Abbott, who was so enthusiastic that he immediately decided to produce as well as direct it. The agreement was that Abbott would help them write the script, but "he had it all finished before we could get started," Rodgers said. "The book was so sharp, witty, fast-moving and, in an odd way, so very much in keeping with the bawdy Shakespearean tradition that neither Larry nor I wanted to change a line." Abbott retained one line from the original play, spoken by the Abbess: "The venom clamors of a jealous woman poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth." To make sure no one missed the learned allusion, the line was followed by a sudden appearance of Jimmy Savo, bobbing out from the wings and proudly announcing, "Shakespeare!"
The tart wit and verve of the lyrics, allied to the most delightful score Rodgers had written since Babes in Arms, made an irresistible combination: "Falling in Love with Love" and "This Can’t Be Love" were songs that have remained popular, but there were others, like "What Can You Do With a Man?" and "Come With Me," that sound as fresh as the day they were written. There was also one clever little tune, "Sing for Your Supper," that went on to fame and glory:
Sing for your supper,
And you’ll get breakfast.
Songbirds always eat
If their song is sweet to hear.
Another song, "Dear Old Syracuse," introduced by Savo and Eddie Albert, playing Antipholus of Syracuse ("I wanna go back, go back/To dear old Syracuse"), included the lines:
And should a man philander
The goose forgives the gander.
When the search for love becomes a mania,
You can take the night boat to Albania.
Hart’s friend Garry Stevens said: "There was a night boat to Albany that left Forty-second Street at about eight in the evening and went up to Albany, 135 miles or so up the Hudson, and returned next morning before eight a.m. It was a floating motel. Lawyers, doctors, ad-agency men, Wall Street people had staterooms on the boat and would take their models, girlfriends, mistresses, or whatever you want to call them, on their one-night stands, and their wives thought they were on a trip to Philadelphia. Larry Hart was the smartest of songwriters because he knew all about everything…So when in the song ‘Dear Old Syracuse’ he comes up with a ‘mania’ to ‘take the night boat to Albania,’ everyone in the theatre laughed at the audacity of the rhyme but didn’t get the inner reference. But I knew what he was talking about."
By 1938, his sister-in-law Dorothy Hart wrote, whether Larry Hart was drinking any more than usual was hard to tell, but it was clear that it was having an effect on his health. He ate less and less and had frequent blackouts when he would forget whom he had just seen or what he was doing. Then, in the autumn of that year, during tryouts for The Boys from Syracuse, Hart took to his bed with pneumonia. As a result he missed the New York opening of the new musical and did not see it until a Saturday matinee some three weeks later.
His sister-in-law wondered whether he was losing interest in the theatre. During those rehearsals of The Boys from Syracuse he did attend, he spent most of his time waiting for his chauffeur to bring him the racing results. His disappearances left more and more responsibilities on his partner’s shoulders, and Rodgers often found himself writing lyrics as well. In Too Many Girls, for instance, he had to make all the necessary changes and wrote the lyrics for the opening number, "Heroes in the Fall." The times when Hart was there and available were a godsend. Rodgers wrote that whenever a new line or new verse was needed, it would take him no time to come up with one. "Once Abbott and I were in deep conversation at a table and Larry was sitting with us. Our animated talk didn’t bother him in the least; he just kept scribbling away and when he was finished he’d written the verse to ‘Falling in Love with Love.’" Fortunately, The Boys from Syracuse had not required any major changes once the company went up to New Haven. But, Rodgers wrote, "how much longer could our luck hold out?"
Their luck certainly held for The Boys from Syracuse. The casting of Savo and Hart as twins was inspired: "Not only did the two diminutive comedians impart the same air of boyish innocence and pathos, but they looked so much alike they could almost have passed for twins," wrote theatre historian Gerald Bordman of this "joyous romp," which ran for 235 performances. It closed in the summer of 1939, and by the autumn Rodgers and Hart had yet another hit.
Excerpted with permission from Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers. ©2001 by Meryle Secrest Beveridge. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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