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(Other great shows, as recent productions of “ West Side Story” and “ The Music Man” have shown, are harder to revive, more dependent on original circumstances and the original cast than one might have hoped.) In fact, of all the great shows of the period from 1940 to 1965, when Broadway was still the place where hit songs came from, Hammerstein’s are perhaps the only shows that do reliably work in revival, and, though Rodgers was the genius of the pair, that the shows live on is Hammerstein’s doing. The Hammerstein shows need “updating”-the famous slap-from-beyond-the-grave in “Carousel” reads very differently now than it did then-but that’s not the same as needing wholesale rewriting or being outright rejected. First, there have been many startlingly successful revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which may have dated in attitude but haven’t dated onstage: “ South Pacific,” “ Carousel,” and “ Oklahoma!” all still live in ways that none of the Rodgers and Hart musicals quite do (“On Your Toes” somewhat and “Pal Joey” significantly excepted). In the years since Sheed and Wilder wrote, two things have altered in the theatre world. Photograph from Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Oscar Hammerstein, at right, and his frequent collaborator Richard Rodgers, left, are pictured in 1943, at work in New York City. (Rodgers, the greatest genius of the musical theatre, pivots between these two kinds.) (Almost the only one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs to become a popular jazz standard was “My Favorite Things,” which was not so much swung as swept away in John Coltrane’s imagination.) In fact, the lovers of popular song tend to break into two schools without quite knowing it: a school of Hart, which loves theatre music for the songs that it makes and wants them swung, or at least illuminated and a school of Hammerstein, which loves theatre music for its theatricality and is almost proud to sacrifice songfulness, let alone swing, for the sake of character and story. Alec Wilder’s epoch-marking and groundbreaking 1972 book, “ American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” treated the early Rodgers worshipfully, and post-Hart Rodgers disdainfully-Wilder hated the “South Pacific” song “Some Enchanted Evening” (“pale and pompous and bland”), and although he didn’t directly blame Hammerstein for the badness you could hardly miss the point.īut then both Wilder and Sheed were invested in American song because of its jazz affinities, invested in the “swinging” interpretations of a Mabel Mercer or a Peggy Lee or a Frank Sinatra, far more than in the original cast recordings. In Wilfrid Sheed’s “ The House That George Built,” his delightful amateur history of American song, the moment in the early nineteen-forties when the composer Richard Rodgers escapes from the dissolute and inspired lyricist Larry Hart to join up with the starchier Hammerstein, to collaborate on “Oklahoma!,” is the postwar settlement in a nutshell, all greeting-card sentiments and phony mythmaking.

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The collaborator on “The Sound of Music”-the movie version of which was dismissed as mere “gigantic sniffles” by our own Pauline Kael-had been a figure to condescend to, the postwar suburban bard of ersatz Americana. Of all the great makers of the American song, none has undergone so drastic a change in educated-O.K., call it “élite”-opinion in the past twenty years as Hammerstein.

(He was always the second, named after his grandfather, who, like most of his family, was a major figure in theatre, very much the family trade.)

I refer to the lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein, the author of “South Pacific” and “The King and I” and so many other musicals, who is now the subject of a just published, and fascinating, collection of letters, “ The Letters Of Oscar Hammerstein II,” edited by Mark Eden Horowitz, from Oxford University Press. Having fit, or tried to, just about the whole history of English rhyme into a recent essay, I nonetheless left out a section about perhaps the most influential of all American rhymesters-who, ironically, had no particular gift or even interest in sound or in language for its own shimmering sake, and who basically hid his rhyme away.