Word: hammerstein
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...Hart's impression was cartoonish, it was surely an animated cartoon. Everyone noticed his energy and felt its force. In Meryle Secrest's book "Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers",Hammerstein is quoted as saying of Hart, "In all the time I knew him I never saw him walk slowly. I never saw his face in repose. I never heard him chuckle quietly. He laughed loudly and easily at other people's jokes and at his own too. He large eyes danced and his head would wag." A young man of ravenous intelligence, he was well-schooled...
...Noel Coward said, mixing envy and awe, "The man positively pees melody." Speed was essential in the mid-20s, when Dick and Larry finally got cooking and, in 1926, produced 60 songs for six shows. But Rodgers didn't lose anything off his fast ball when he teamed with Hammerstein; it is said he composed the entire "Oklahoma!" score in six working days. An impatient man condemned to collaborate with slow pokes, he learned to simmer waiting for Hart to show up from one of his night-crawls...
...wasn't that Hart agonized over the lyrics (as Hammerstein did); Larry could be lightning-quick when he got down to work. It was that he agonized over life. His felt a misplaced person, a Martian or Munchkin whose job was to observe the beautiful people, then put equally ravishing words in their bowed mouths - to make them sound and feel as smart as they looked...
...rural drama "Green Grow the Lilacs." Offered the chance to write that would become "Oklahoma!", Hart sensibly said no thanks. (It's hard to imagine a less Hart-y show.) Did he think Rodgers would drop the project rather than commit professional adultery and go off for a Hammerstein fling? If so, he thought wrong. After the opening-night performance, Hart walked into Sardi's and told Rodgers, "This is one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life, and it'll be playing 20 years from now." On the 1998 PBS special "The Rodgers & Hart Story...
...Thus was a discordant coda to the complicated friendship of two Makers of Melody. Rodgers continued his uniquely popular and remunerative collaboration with Hammerstein. They wrote 10 more musicals, from the 1945 "Carousel" to the 1959 "The Sound of Music" - which has proved so durable that what originally was kitsch endures as camp, in the sing-along movie version that so enthralled Londoners a couple of years ago. On stage, the R&Ham shows are still playing ("Oklahoma!" is on Broadway now) and will keep playing ("Flower Drum Song" opens in October...