Dominic Symonds - Well Have Manhattan (Broadway Legacies)

A 1938 Time magazine cover story boldly proclaimed that nobody ever fused words and music more effectively than Rodgers and Hart. The twenty-six Broadway shows the pair created between their first meeting in 1919 and Harts death in 1943 contain a vast legacy of timeless songs, at least one or two in each show (see the accompanying footnote for a representative list of fine songs first appearing in the shows that are explored in the present volume). But while the songs are glorious and rightfully revered, the shows that introduced them are far less well known and less appreciated. This is a shame. From the beginning of their career, the boys from Columbia [i.e., Columbia University] worked hard to use songs to tell stories in new ways and often achieved this goal. The result was a succession of innovative musicals that broke new dramatic ground and a long list of swell and witty, sweet and grand, and often wicked, beautifully crafted, sophisticated, memorable, and seldom formulaic songs.

Despite their relatively low profilewith some exceptions later in their career such as On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), and the widely acclaimed pioneering classic Pal Joey (1940)the Rodgers and Hart shows, especially those from the early years, deserve to be better known and understood. This is where the author of Well Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart, 19191943 comes to the rescue. Symonds, Reader in Drama at the University of Lincoln, author of the forthcoming Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song (University of Michigan Press), co-editor (with George Burrows) of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre, and co-founder of the international conference Song, Stage and Screen, has meticulously but engagingly examined the early work of Rodgers and Hart with special attention to the two Garrick Gaieties (1925 and 1926), Dearest Enemy (1925), The Girl Friend and Peggy-Ann (1926), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Chee-Chee (1928), and the three shows the team wrote for the London stage, Lido Lady (1926), One Dam Thing after Another (1927), and Ever Green (1930, on which the 1934 film Evergreen is based). Symonds also offers a chapter on the teams frustrating, mostly amateur years between 1919 and 1925, during which they struggled to find a place in the commercial marketplace. They finally took Manhattan by storm with the song Manhattan in the Theatre Guild fundraiser, the Garrick Gaieties of 1925. Another chapter, on their less successful Broadway efforts that followed the stock market crash of 1929, illuminates a series of lesser successes that prompted the pair to seek their fortune in Hollywood (a story to be continued in Symondss second volume).