The Decline of Richard Rodgers

There was a time when almost everything Richard Rodgers wrote was good. Now almost everything he writes is praised. He has become an institution of the musical comedy stage—and his imprimatur is sufficient to impress the critics. Yet year by year, his scores have become increasingly drab. His wonderful gift of song seems to have left him. And he is rewriting Richards Rodgers to such an extent that it can be said without too much unkindness that you can no longer tell the tune without the lyrics.

No Strings, his latest effort, has been pasted up with the rave comments of reviewers whose tin-eared appraisals are conditioned far more by what they think they should write than by what their senses tell them. For No Strings (Capital O 1695) is a feeble reworking of themes and modes from Flower Drum Song (Columbia OL 5350), which derived from Me and Juliet (RCA-Victor LOC 1012), which was sired by South Pacific (Columbia OL 4180), which, etc., etc. (Numbers refer to original cast recordings.) There is not a single song in the score which has an original lilt—and the music is further bereft of Lorenz Hart’s emotionally evocative or abrasively clever lyrics, or latterly Oscar Hammerstein’s pretentious but interesting and literate versifying.

RT

About the Author

Ralph de Toledano

Featured Tags

There was a time when almost everything Richard Rodgers wrote was good. Now almost everything he writes is praised. He has become an institution of the musical comedy stage—and his imprimatur is sufficient to impress the critics. Yet year by year, his scores have become increasingly drab. His wonderful gift of song seems to have left him. And he is rewriting Richards Rodgers to such an extent that it can be said without too much unkindness that you can no longer tell the tune without the lyrics.

No Strings, his latest effort, has been pasted up with the rave comments of reviewers whose tin-eared appraisals are conditioned far more by what they think they should write than by what their senses tell them. For No Strings (Capital O 1695) is a feeble reworking of themes and modes from Flower Drum Song (Columbia OL 5350), which derived from Me and Juliet (RCA-Victor LOC 1012), which was sired by South Pacific (Columbia OL 4180), which, etc., etc. (Numbers refer to original cast recordings.) There is not a single song in the score which has an original lilt—and the music is further bereft of Lorenz Hart’s emotionally evocative or abrasively clever lyrics, or latterly Oscar Hammerstein’s pretentious but interesting and literate versifying.