Word: hammerstein
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...Songs. He had already survived many such moments. No living American has fashioned so many rhymes that are familiar to so many people. Oscar Hammerstein (rhymes with fine) is one of the highest-paid men in show business (one estimate places his yearly income at $500,000).* He has written book and lyrics for 30-odd musicals, including Rose Marie, Sunny, Desert Song, Show Boat, New Moon, Carmen Jones, Oklahoma!, Carousel. He has written the lyrics for nearly 1,000 songs (which has earned him a coveted AA rating by ASCAP), including such imperishables as Indian Love Call...
...Hammerstein was worried about Allegro. Said he: "It's the first play I have written. It's the first time I have put myself into a show." Next day, he should have been feeling pretty good. He had written something he had greatly wanted to write. He had heard a tough first-night audience salute it, time & again, with excited applause. He had been informed by some of the critics that Allegro was "perfect," "a work of rare distinction," something that "made history on Broadway" (the Times's Brooks Atkinson found it a thing of "great beauty...
Perhaps some of the talk-like some of the reviews-would not be frenzied, or even favorable. Beyond doubt, Allegro was a real departure for Hammerstein & Rodgers, and perhaps they might better have stayed where they were. Beyond doubt, Allegro was something on a pretty big scale-but that something might be artistic failure...
...Allegro, with all its faults, is an impressive effort in a good cause: it is the latest sortie in that well-nigh-won revolution against cloak-and-daguerreotype operetta and June-moon musicomedy. In that revolution, Oscar Hammerstein is certainly one of the heroes. He put something like real people into Oklahoma! and Carousel; but Allegro is by far the most realistic of his librettos, by far the most deliberate manifestation of the New Look he gave to musical plays...
...most Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths, the earnest philosophizing behind these lines would look like a Supreme Court justice's robes on a race-track tout. On Hammerstein, who has the stature for it, it doesn't look...