The Age of Rodgers and Hart

Abstract Within a few months of their initial meeting Rodgers and Hart managed to get one of their songs interpolated into a professional show, “Any Old Place with You” (A Lonely Romeo, 1919). The following year they discovered on opening night that their first Broadway score, Poor Little Ritz Girl, had been reduced to about a half dozen songs (the rest, by the well-established Sigmund Romberg, had been inserted surreptitiously). For the next five years Rodgers and Hart endured a discouraging apprentice period in which they composed twelve amateur shows, most of which disappeared after a single viewing. On the brink of quitting, they scored a surprise success with the Theatre Guild’s fund-raiser revue, The Garrick Gaieties (1925), a show that also introduced their first hit song, “Manhattan: originally composed for the unproduced Winkle Town in 1922. For the next three years Rodgers and Hart surpassed all other teams in productivity and popular runs. The prolific and insightful Broadway historian Ethan Mordden sets the stage for the present collection with a survey of Rodgers and Hart’s principal shows among the fourteen that appeared in the last half of the 1920s, the first decade of what Mordden designates “the golden age” of the American musical (1920-1970). Mordden waxes enthusiastically about Rodgers and Hart’s first book show, the Revolutionary War costume drama, Dearest Enemy (1925), “a comedy of contemporary manners burlesquing a comedy of bygone manners,” the strikingly original Peggy-Ann (1926), which “typifies the musical’s unending quest for new forms: and Heads Up! (1929), where “the inventions simply tumble over themselves: He also perceives dramatic infelicities in shows that offered fine scores, for example The Girl Friend (1926) and A Connecticut Yankee (1927).