The Sound of Their Music : The Story of Rodgers and HammersteinRevised and Updated

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating, charming double bio
Review: Frederick Nolan tells the story of Rodgers and Hammerstein both as a team and as separate people. Indeed there is a good deal of space allotted to their careers BEFORE they ever worked together. But after they team up the narrative becomes more lively and a real page turner, at least partly because Nolan's style is graceful and charming in itself. He seems to have read everything written about them, even going so far as to watch TV kinescopes of them from the 1950s, and he talked to many people who knew them, worked with them.

It's the backstage stories that make the book sing. Practically every page has a at least one fascinating anecdote. And he doesn't sugar-coat their personalities--Rodgers's curtness, even cruelty, and Hammerstein's insecurity, tendency to swallow his pride.

It's hard to read the book without singing to yourself. My God, what songs these two wrote! But more than that, what dramatists they were; they broke convention again and again and mostly successfully.

Pull out your recordings of Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific and start reading!