Richard Rodgers

Description

Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals. Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein. Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Rodgers, the Workaholic CHAPTER 1 From Apprentice to Musical Dramatist CHAPTER 2 A Tale of Two Connecticut Yankees CHAPTER 3 Hits, Long Runs, and a Musical Comedy of Errors CHAPTER 4 World War II, the Musical: South Pacific CHAPTER 5 Broadway Comes to Television: The Three Cinderellas CHAPTER 6 After Hammerstein Works by Richard Rodgers Notes Permissions General Index Index of Rodgers’s Works