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Musical Stages: An Autobiography
From
Oklahoma!
to
Carousel
,
The Sound of Music
to
The King and I
, the sights and sounds of Broadway were dominated by Richard Rodgers for the better part of the twentieth century. "A memoir worthy of one of the great names in the American theater" (
Washington Post
), it's packed with backstage tales of everyone's favorite musicals, and features new material by his daughter
...more
Paperback
,
384 pages
Published
April 18th 2002
by Da Capo Press
(first published September 1st 1975)
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Community Reviews
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1-30
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Charming tales from the best there ever was (until Sondheim came along). Certainly aware of his own importance in the genre of composition for the musical theater, but you can glean from this book that he certainly earned that attitude. Would have given this a higher rating had there been more information about what the process of creating each the shows had been. Some of his material really got short-changed. Only a page and a half for "Flower Drum Song"? I wanted a chapter on that show alone!
...more
The best thing about an autobiography is that it doesn't usually end with a death! (although in the "centenary edition" I was reading, there was an afterword that covered the last years of Rodgers' life). The worst thing is that you usually only get half the picture, if that, especially if the author is, as Rodgers obviously was, fairly conservative, conventional and private. What I enjoyed most about this book were the passages where he detailed the kind of thinking that went into the compositi
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You won't learn much about Rodgers's creative process in this brisk memoir; if anything, it appears that the secret to his five decades of musical-theater success may have been his total lack of self-awareness. But if you grew up listening to the likes of "Oklahoma," "The Sound of Music" and "South Pacific," it's still fairly thrilling to read about the mix of trial and error, inspiration and serendipity that brought those shows to life.
Made me rethink the talent of the man himself, all while reinforcing my opinion that his gorgeous, hilarious, sharp, and nation-changing work with Hart is head-and-shoulders above the sentimentality he accomplished with Hammerstein.
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