Word: hammersteins
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Chow's next role is as the King of Siam, opposite Jodie Foster as Anna, in a new version of the story Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musicalized in 1951 and filmed with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner five years later. So who needs another King and I movie? Kids, apparently. So here is an animated feature that expands and dumbs down the story. There's some kung fu, a Jafar-style villain with satanic powers, a cartoon menagerie (funny monkey, majestic leopard, etc.), and lame comedy with a crudely drawn, Buddha-shaped fall guy. It's all needless...
Annie Get Your Gun has never had the emotional durability of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics, or the cachet for sophisticates of the early Gershwin or Porter musicals. What's more, the show today sets off political-correctness alarms with its stereotypical portrayal of Indians. But the book has been updated by Peter Stone (Titanic) in ways that pass p.c. muster without losing all the fun. A song has been dropped (I'm an Indian Too); an interracial love story has been added; and the Native Americans in Buffalo Bill's show are now quite obviously playing along with...
Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote nine musicals together. Five are legendary hits: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. (Flower Drum Song was a success, but not in the same league as the golden five.) They wrote one film musical, State Fair, and the TV special Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews. They were also hugely canny producers. Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun was but one of the works they produced that was not their own. Their flops--Allegro, Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream--were probably a result, as much as anything, of their...
What sets the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals apart for me is their directness and their awareness of the importance of construction in musical theater. Years ago, I played through the piano score of South Pacific. It is staggering how skillfully reprises are used as scene-change music that sets up a following number or underlines a previous point. It could only be the product of a hugely close relationship in which each partner sensed organically where the other, and the show, was going...
...After Hammerstein's death from cancer in 1960, Rodgers valiantly plowed on. He worked with Stephen Sondheim on a musical, Do I Hear a Waltz? An attempt at a collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of My Fair Lady, came to nothing. I can vouch for Alan's never having had the almost puritanical discipline that Rodgers found so satisfactory in Hammerstein. Sadly, too, with one or two exceptions, the post-Hammerstein melodies paled against Rodgers' former output. Who can say why? Perhaps it was simply the lack of the right partner to provide inspiration and bring out the best...