Stuff I’ve Been Reading: October/November 2018

books read:

• Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution—Todd S. Purdum
• The Order of Time—Carlo Rovelli
• The Incurable Romantic and Other Unsettling Revelations—Frank Tallis
• The Queen’s Gambit—Walter Tevis

books bought:

• The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built—Jack Viertel
• The Incurable Romantic and Other Unsettling Revelations—Frank Tallis
• Making Oscar Wilde—Michele Mendelssohn
• The Friend—Sigrid Nunez
• Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness—Frank Tallis
• Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life—Jonathan Gould
• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder—Caroline Fraser

Where to start? One book I read this month challenges everything I, and perhaps even you, assumed about time and space; another is a joint biography of the men who wrote Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. Which of these two is more important to us here at The Believer? Well, there’s no real argument, is there? This magazine, or this column, anyway, believes that while second-act problems in musical theater productions are perhaps not everything, they are certainly more important than mind-boggling ideas about the way we understand the stupid universe.

Something Wonderful is above all a marvelous book about the arts and the artistic process. Todd S. Purdum provides a more than satisfying biography of Rodgers and Hammerstein, their successes and failures, their marriages, their money. But he’s just as comfortable, and very acute, writing about their craft. He points out, for example, that “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’,” the opening number of Oklahoma!, the first show they wrote together, takes the shape of a folk ballad, rather than a thirty-two-bar musical number, and that the repeated lines (“There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow. / There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow”) are borrowed from the stylistically appropriate field holler tradition. The whole of Oklahoma! was a stylistic risk. The story, songs, and choreography were all entwined in a way that Broadway hadn’t seen before, effectively creating the model we have been watching ever since. And like Hamilton, you would have had more luck getting a job in the chorus than a ticket to see it.

Comparisons to Hamilton are not spurious. Every time a new Rodgers and Hammerstein show is launched, you think, Huh. That’s a crazy subject for a piece of musical entertainment—whether it’s the formation of a new state, or the relationship between a governess and a king, or the grim poverty of the life of a fairground barker, or the interactions of American servicemen and South Sea...