Rodgers and Hart - Analysis

Analysis

Time Magazine devoted a cover story to Rodgers and Hart (September 26, 1938). They wrote that their success "rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored". The article also noted the "spirit of adventure." "As Rodgers and Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon."

Their songs have long been favorites of cabaret singers and jazz artists. For example, Ella Fitzgerald recorded their songbook. Andrea Marcovicci based one of her cabaret acts entirely on Rodgers and Hart songs.

Hart's lyrics, facile, vernacular, dazzling, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholic, raised the standard for Broadway songwriting. "His ability to write cleverly and to come up with unexpected, polysyllabic rhymes was something of a trademark, but he also had the even rarer ability to write with utmost simplicity and deep emotion." Rodgers, as a creator of melodies, ranks with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin.

Their shows belong to the era when musicals were revue-like and librettos were not much more than excuses for comic turns and music cues. Still, just as their songs were a cut above, so did the team try to raise the standard of the musical form in general. Thus, A Connecticut Yankee (1927) was based on Mark Twain's novel, and The Boys From Syracuse (1938) on William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. "They had always considered the integration of story and music a crucial factor in a successful show." They used dance significantly in their work, using the ballets of George Balanchine.

Comparisons between Rodgers and Hart and the successor team of Rodgers and Hammerstein are inevitable. Hammerstein's lyrics project warmth, sincere optimism, and occasional corniness. Hart's lyrics showed greater sophistication in subject matter, more use of overt verbal cleverness, and more of a "New York" or "Broadway" sensibility. The archetypal Rodgers and Hart song, "Manhattan," rhymes "The great big city's a wondrous toy/Just made for a girl and boy" in the first stanza, then reprises with "The city's glamor can never spoil/The dreams of a boy and goil" in the last. Many of the songs ("Falling in Love with Love", "Little Girl Blue", "My Funny Valentine") are wistful or sad, and emotional ambivalence seems to be perceptible in the background of even the sunnier songs. For example, "You Took Advantage of Me" appears to be an evocation of amorous joy, but the very title suggests some doubt as to whether the relationship is mutual or exploitative.