Mr. Rogers Has a Change of Hart

When Richard Rogers was a student at Columbia University, he was asked to team up with a recent graduate of that school, named Lorenz Hart, to write songs for a campus musical production. That formed the beginning of a very productive partnership that lasted for over twenty years and gave us some of our greatest all-time hit songs.

And, while the bulk of these songs came out in the 1920s and 1930s, they were still popular many years later. Who would have guessed that a hit song from rock and roll's early days that started out, "Bomp-a-bomp bomp-a bomp-a-bomb bomb-a bomp-a bomp bomp-a dangy-dang-dang-a dingy-dong-ding" would turn out to be the superlative Rogers and Hart hit, "Blue Moon?"

Richard Rogers was perhaps Broadway's most brilliant composer. As it turns out, though, his genius really became apparent when viewed in tandem with the talented lyricists he worked with.

In his first partnership, the major force may have been Hart, whose lyrics were often nothing short of inspired. Of course Rogers' music was a joy to listen to, but it seemed to serve as a backdrop to the clever way his partner could manipulate words.

One of their best collaborations was the song, "Manhattan," which was a general celebration of New York (and not just the one borough), and featured such clever rhymes as, "We'll go to Yonkers, where true love conquers in the wild."

At another point in the song, Hart makes reference to a long-running play of the time (1925), with: "We'll take our babies to go see Abie's Irish Rose. I hope they live to see it close." Later someone would adjust those lines to substitute "My Fair Lady," but by then, Mr. Hart was long gone.

Another clever song, which I once got the opportunity to sing in a scripted R&H revue called Sing for Your Supper, was "Mountain Greenery." Rather than wear my nostril spelunkers to the nub mis-typing the lyrics, let me give you this musical taste instead.

I could go on and on, because their output was prodigious. What I will do instead is strongly recommend you get an album of their music. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rogers and Hart Songbook would certainly be a good place to start. If you play piano, any collection of their sheet music could bring you hours of pleasure.

If I haven't made the thing clear yet, let me point out that the music Rogers and Hart composed consisted largely of show tunes. I and many other present-day fans of their music tend to appreciate their many songs as isolated items, though. Why would that be? Well, for a good many years, Broadway musicals were almost all about the music and very little else. The plots were uniformly silly and flimsy. Even Cole Porter's Anything Goes, perhaps the best-written of the older Broadway shows, is a little ridiculous compared to modern Broadway fare, or even the musicals of the 1950s and 1960s.

It is because of that situation that I have little to go on when I try to rate their music in the context of the shows. Nor should I even attempt to do so. People did not flock to them to be told a story. They wanted song and dance and lots of it.

Speaking of that latter commodity, when I was in rehearsal for the Sing for Your Supper revue, there was a song called " 'Cause We Got Cake," for which the choreography featured, not surprisingly, a cakewalk. After the cast stumbled through the bit once or twice, the choreographer snapped, "I want all of you people to stand still and watch how Tom and Debbie do this number!"

In a somewhat younger day, I knew my way around a dance routine, but I was never, never, ever going to be confused with Fred Astaire. "Uh-oh," I thought, "if I'm the good example, this show is in deep poop."

The important thing about the Rogers and Hart collaboration was that they managed to synchronize their creativity to produce these songs. Aside from New York and Columbia University, the two had little in common. Lorenz Hart was older, gayer and drunker than his partner, which is not to say that Richard Rogers was either of those last two. Still, he was easily able to overlook Hart's idiosyncrasies, as long as the two of them could keep cranking out the hits.

There came a time, though, when Hart's carousing began to make him unreliable, to Rogers' mounting irritation. Hart's lifestyle was doing more than impairing his reliability, though. His alcoholism was killing him. Sadly, when the drink finally took his life, the two partners were hardly on speaking terms. Sadly, also, Lorenz Hart may not have even been the most creative musical talent to drink himself to death in 1943. More about that in a later essay.

Their last successful collaboration had been for a show called Pal Joey, which featured their usual excellent music (including I Could Write A Book along with Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered), but, even though it purported to be a little more serious than the typical Broadway show of the time, did not offer much in the way of a story.

In a final attempt to get his straying partner to cut out the carousing and focus on the thing that made him a genius, Rogers asked Hart if he would collaborate with him on the musical adaptation of a play called Green Grow the Lilacs. Hart, sicker and more despondent than ever and close to death, essentially told him to go to hell.

A disappointed Richard Rogers then turned to a fellow he had done a little work with in the past to be his lyricist for that project. The new lyricist was a guy named Oscar Hammerstein II, and the musical adaptation was a show than ended up being called Oklahoma! Broadway musicals would never be the same after that.

Sources

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