Rodgers & Hammerstein: The Comeback Nobody in the Room Believed In

Two months before Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in March 1943, its prospects looked bad enough that a producer reportedly walked out of the New Haven tryout at intermission. A cable summarizing the industry's verdict made its way into Walter Winchell's column: "No legs, no jokes, no chance." No chorus girls, no comedy, nothing Broadway audiences supposedly wanted. It went on to run for 2,212 performances, win a special Pulitzer Prize, and permanently change what a musical was allowed to be about and how it was allowed to be built.

That show was the first thing Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote together. Neither of them was an unknown quantity walking in. Both, in different ways, badly needed it to work.

A lyricist who hadn't had a hit in over a decade

Oscar Hammerstein II had real early success, most famously Show Boat in 1927 with composer Jerome Kern, which gave the American musical "Ol' Man River" and a new level of dramatic ambition. But the years after that were rough. By the early 1940s, Hammerstein had strung together a run of Broadway flops, one after another, badly enough that industry insiders had started treating him as someone to avoid rather than hire. He kept working anyway. Later, once Oklahoma! had proven he wasn't finished, he took out an ad in Variety that didn't hide from the failures. It listed his previous shows and their short runs, plainly, followed by a single line: "I've done it before and I can do it again."

If you've ever wanted to bury a string of failures instead of naming them, Hammerstein's ad is worth remembering. He didn't disguise the losing streak. He put it in print and dared the industry to hold it against him anyway.

A composer between partners

Richard Rodgers, meanwhile, had spent over two decades writing with Lorenz Hart, a partnership that had produced some of the sharpest, most inventive scores of the era but had become, by the early 1940s, increasingly unworkable because of Hart's alcoholism and unreliability. Rodgers needed a collaborator he could actually count on to finish a show. Hammerstein needed someone willing to hire him after a decade of nothing landing. Producer Theresa Helburn brought the two of them together to adapt Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs into what became Oklahoma!. It wasn't an obvious pairing to outsiders. It turned out to be one of the most successful creative partnerships American theater has ever produced.

Flipping the order that had defined Rodgers's whole career

One of the most important things about this partnership is easy to miss if you don't know how differently Rodgers had worked before. With Hart, Rodgers wrote the music first and Hart fit words to it afterward. With Hammerstein, the process reversed entirely: Hammerstein wrote the lyric first, often as a complete poem, and Rodgers composed music to fit the words and their rhythm. It's a genuinely different discipline, and Rodgers adapted to it completely for the rest of his career.

That reversal shaped the songs themselves. Hammerstein's lyrics, written without a melody yet constraining them, tend to be more expansive and narrative than Hart's tightly wound, rhyme-dense wit; Rodgers's music, built to serve an already-finished lyric, leans warmer and more direct. Neither approach is better. They're simply different tools for different kinds of collaboration, and the fact that Rodgers could switch fully from one method to the other, after twenty years of doing it the opposite way, says something about how adaptable a working songwriter has to be when the partner changes.

Building musicals around a story, not a star turn

Oklahoma! is often credited as the first "integrated" musical, meaning the songs grow directly out of character and plot rather than functioning as detachable specialty numbers dropped into a loose revue-style show. That idea didn't originate with Rodgers and Hammerstein alone, but they applied it with a consistency and commercial success that made it the new standard for the entire industry. Every show that followed, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music, kept pushing the same idea further: songs written to reveal something specific about a specific character in a specific moment, not interchangeable tunes that could be lifted into any show with a similar ballad.

Seventeen years, dozens of awards

Between 1943 and Hammerstein's death in 1960, the partnership produced eleven Broadway musicals and, across their careers together, a combined haul that includes 35 Tony Awards, 15 Academy Awards, and two Pulitzer Prizes. Almost every one of those shows contains at least one song that's still standard repertoire, "Some Enchanted Evening," "Getting to Know You," "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," "Edelweiss," Hammerstein's final lyric, written while he was already ill with the stomach cancer that killed him months after The Sound of Music opened in 1959.

What's worth taking from their partnership

Rodgers and Hammerstein is frequently called the most successful partnership in Broadway history, and it's worth remembering that it started with one collaborator carrying more than a decade of public failure and the other walking away from the only creative partnership he'd ever known. Neither man had momentum on his side. What they had instead was a genuine willingness to change how they worked, Rodgers reversing a twenty-year habit, Hammerstein absorbing repeated rejection without quitting, and a shared conviction that a musical could do more than entertain between the jokes.

If people whose opinion you'd normally trust are telling you a project has no legs, no jokes, and no chance, it's worth remembering that some of the best-loved musicals in American history opened under exactly that verdict. If you're looking for the collaborator who might help you prove them wrong, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Richard Rodgers, Songwriters Hall of Fame: Oscar Hammerstein, Britannica: Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodgers & Hammerstein: Oscar Hammerstein II, Quote Investigator: No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance, NPR: Reviving Allegro, Even Rodgers and Hammerstein Had Flops