“As Corny as Kansas in August, As Restless as a Willow in a Windstorm”

Abstract Gerald Mast offers a rich critical survey that focuses on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s popular quintet (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and /, and The Sound of Music) and their film adaptations. He displaces Sondheim with Hammerstein as the primogenitor of the “concept” musical (“Hammerstein was the first American to devise a concept for a musical and to write every show within it”), while at the same time challenging the widely accepted notion that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows are totally integrated (“their shows do not integrate music and dramatic action so much as music and character”). He also shows through example how R&H tie up “a complicated plot” in short second acts “with very little musical twine” and how they modify the standard thirty-two bar song forms and remove “the essential distinction between verse and refrain” in their songs. Throughout his survey Mast addresses the larger cultural contexts and argues that R&H contained “musical debates on the pressing legal and social issues facing the American public and American public policy:’ Mast is tough on the first four R&H films, Oklahoma! in 1955, Carousel and The King and I in 1956, and South Pacific in 1958, displaying particular antipathy toward Carousel, “the worst of the lot:’ For Mast, “these four Rodgers and Hammerstein films reject the entire history of the filmusical, especially the powerful relationship of space to music:’ On the other hand he finds much to praise in The Sound of Music (1965), crediting director Robert Wise for converting Hammerstein’s “verbal poetry into visual imagery, freely intercutting images and telescoping space while characters sang;’ and making the lives of its characters “inseparable from the scenic surroundings:’*