We’ll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart by Dominic Symonds

Abstract

We'll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart. By Dominic Symonds. (Broadway Legacies.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. [xx, 332 p. ISBN 9780199929481 (hardcover), $34.95; (e-book, Oxford Scholarship Online).] Music examples, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.Dominic Symonds's We'll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers and Hart is the latest volume in Oxford University Press's Legacies series. It joins volumes in the series such as Philip Lambert's To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick (2011) and Jeffrey Magee's Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater (2012) as a semi-biography that focuses on its subjects' working methods and products. Like Magee's volume, We'll Have Manhattan contributes to a growing body of literature on early musical comedies. Until recently, scholars have studied individual songs from this era, but shows in entirety have been largely dismissed as negligible vehicles for hit songs. For example, in Larry Stempel's Showtime: A History of the Musical Theater, the chapter on 1920s musical comedies is titled Broadway Songbook, and Stempel focuses on generic qualities of these songs and how their lyrics were sufficiently general in content to make perfect sense without reference to a (Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Musical Theater [New York: W. W. Norton, 2010], 247). Magee's and Symonds's books indicate that scholars are beginning to move away from this perspective. Whereas the scope of Magee's book encompasses more than this early era of musical comedy, Symonds focuses on the output of Rodgers and Hart between 1925 and 1931, leaving the team's later works for a forthcoming volume in the series, titled The Boys from Columbia: Rodgers and Hart, 1932-1943. With such a narrow focus, We'll Have Manhattan offers the most detailed study to date of Rodgers and Hart's 1920s musical theater.The succession of chapters is generally chronological; however, Symonds occasionally abandons chronology to address certain topics. After examining Rodgers and Hart's amateur works in chapter 1, chapter 2 compares and contrasts The Garrick Gaieties and The Fifth Avenue Follies, revues from 1925 and 1926 that were among the team's first hits. The following chapters turn to musical comedy, backing up to discuss Dearest Enemy, which opened in 1925, and The Girl Friend, which opened in 1926, prior to that season's edition of The Garrick Gaieties. Chapter 5 examines the team's shows that opened in London: Lido Lady (1926), One Dam Thing After Another (1927), and Ever Green (1930). Returning to Broadway, the following chapters focus on PeggyAnn (1926), Betsy (1926), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), and Chee-Chee (1928), and the final chapter addresses the team's struggle to find success on the stage. After examining Spring is Here (1929), Heads Up! (1929), Simple Simon (1930), and Sweetheart (1931), the book concludes with a brief discussion of sojourn to Hollywood after the onset of the Great Depression. This is an appropriate point of division between this and the forthcoming volume. As Symonds writes in the epilogue, America's Sweetheart. . . brought to an end the first productive period of [Rodgers and Hart's] career-they would not work in theater again until 1935 (p. 264).Symonds's contributions to the literature are manifold. For one, scholars have had to wait far too long for detailed descriptions of Rodgers and Hart's revues and shows like Dearest Enemy, Lido Lady, and Betsy, from which some of the team's most beloved songs come. We'll Have Manhattan also details Rodgers and Hart's maturation as songwriters, a process that involved experimentation with means of articulating elements of the drama through music and lyrics. Symonds demonstrates that by the end of the period under consideration, Rodgers was relying on leitmotifs and other musical signifiers to write character-driven music, exemplified in Chee-Chee, and Hart had not only mastered pyrotechnic writing-the ability to write flashy and witty rhymes-but also the craft of presenting tender images in the vernacular of his characters (p. …