Who is rodgers and hart

By now, every Rodgers and Hart show was an event, and they themselves were celebrated figures—on the cover of Time , subjects of a two-part profile in The New Yorker. But around the corner was Pal Joey , the most controversial, and influential, of all their shows. There would be one more big hit—back to the ancients with By Jupiter , reuniting the boys with Bolger, in their third show to be directed by Joshua Logan. But by now Larry was essentially gone, succumbing to acute alcoholism.

When he was sober, his mind was as quick and clever as ever. On opening night of A Connecticut Yankee he turned up at the theater drunk, ill, and noisy.

That night, a pal, searching for him, came upon him sitting shivering in the gutter outside a bar on Eighth Avenue. Nothing they could do at the hospital helped—neither the oxygen tent nor penicillin, the new wonder drug that Eleanor Roosevelt interceded with the War Production Board to procure.

It was over. How did Rodgers and Hart write their songs? This is how Larry characterized their work method to a reporter:. Did they ever quarrel? They had differences, though. At first, Larry was the mentor, the semipro; Dick was a schoolboy. Marmorstein writes:. His obsession with being classy never diminished. And he had no interest in money—it came and went, only important so that it could be quickly spent, usually on others.

He was always remorseful, but what good did that do? Dick, so earnest and methodical in his work habits, grew into an angry taskmaster, the bad cop, and he more and more resented having to be one. Yet the two men had loved each other.

Some people believed Larry had been in love with Dick from the start. The unambiguously heterosexual Dick, however, both before and after his marriage to the beautiful, elegant, and difficult Dorothy Feiner, was widely known for his devotion to the girls. Although by the early s Larry was disappearing for days at a time, his drunken binges more and more appalling, Dick proposed that they get to work on an offer from the Theatre Guild: turning the play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical.

He walked out of their meeting, leaving Dick—and the show that became Oklahoma! And then he wept. Years later, Rodgers would describe what Hart looked like to him at their first meeting. The total man was hardly more than five feet tall. He also had a vigorously receding hairline, and he usually had a cigar stuck in his mouth. In public he was dignified about what he clearly saw as his deformity.

Certainly he believed that no one, especially no woman, could love him. Frederick Nolan tells us that Larry was asked by a reporter about his love life. I loved him. But he never believed me. Undoubtedly the woman he cared for most was Vivienne Segal, who was clever, funny, sexy, with a fiery temperament. Still, he proposed more than once, and more than once she turned him down. Poor Frieda Hart—all she wanted was for her boy to settle down with Mrs.

In his biography of Richard Rodgers, William G. Hyland explains,. The major studios were interested in having hit songs in their productions, but the musical knowledge of the producers and many of the directors was limited. The studios therefore put together rudimentary staffs of resident songwriters, musical arrangers, and conductors. The cumbersome system did not necessarily stimulate creativity, but eventually it produced a body of good music.

Nevertheless, even the established composers lost control over whether and how their songs would be used. The final film might contain only snatches of a song. The famous hit, Blue Moon, grew out of this process. In this form, the song was also cut. Then, the studio asked for a nightclub number. These shows were also Richard Rodgers' born to a New York doctor's family start in the theatre, but he did not meet Larry Hart until early , when introduced by a mutual friend to collaborate on songs for an amateur club show.

Rodgers, then only 16, was deeply impressed by Hart's seriousness and erudition in every aspect of lyric-writing: later he said "I was enchanted by this little man and his ideas. Neither of us mentioned it, but we evidently knew we would work together and I left Hart's house, having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend and a permanent source of irritation. Recorded July , London. Recorded 1 November , New York.

Recorded 25 April , New York. Recorded 3 March , New York. Recorded 20 February , New York. Recorded 5 July , Hollywood. Recorded 20 December Recorded 4 May , London. Recorded 21 February , Los Angeles. Recorded 21 September , Los Angeles. Recorded 28 March , New York. Recorded 25 September , New York. Recorded 15 October , New York. Recorded 28 June , New York. About this Recording 8. They gave voice to the feelings of everyday guys and gals, but they did it with a certain streetwise poetry courtesy of Hart and tuneful invention thanks to Rodgers that warranted John O'Hara's observation: 'If those of us who lived and loved and suffered through that time could have put our passions into words and music, it would have sounded just like Rodgers and Hart.

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