We’ll Have Manhattan: The Early Works of Rodgers & Hart by Dominic Symonds (review)

In its close analysis of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “early works,” We’ll Have Manhattan proves not only informative and insightful, as one might expect, but also engaging to read. Symonds spins a compelling narrative, drawing the reader fully into the theatrical world of the 1920s and 1930s. Comprehensive in scope, the book explores their first junior efforts writing songs for summer camp and college shows, the duo’s successes and failures on Broadway and the London stage, and their first work for Hollywood. By the end the reader has learned much about how the pair developed professionally and artistically. The last musical discussed, America’s Sweetheart (1931), serves as a reasonable stopping point, as the pair then took a several-year hiatus from Broadway while pursuing work in film. In the acknowledgments, Symonds writes that the pair’s later collaborations will provide the source material for a second book, The Boys from Columbia: Rodgers and Hart, 1932–1943.

Although the present volume is limited chronologically to the pair’s earlier collaborations, the impressive amount of work Rodgers and Hart produced—some nineteen shows over twelve years—still calls for a certain narrowing of focus. Consequently, Symonds articulates three principal themes for exploration: “how song works dramatically within a narrative”; “how the business of theater, guided by influences from the media, audiences, economics, and technologies, affected their aesthetic and creative output”; and “the significance of identity in the work of Rodgers and Hart” (25–26). These broad topics are explored through a chronological survey of the duo’s work, with each theme allotted appropriate focus depending upon the particular show. This approach yields considerable insight, and Symonds makes important contributions to our understanding of Rodgers and Hart’s collaborative process.

Symonds’s close exploration of theme one, how the pair’s songs function within the dramatic narrative, is valuable, as historians have paid much greater attention in this regard to Rodgers’s later and better-known collaborations with Oscar Hammerstein II. In those shows, including canonic works such as Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), and South Pacific (1949), Rodgers and Hammerstein set new benchmarks for integrating book and music. Rodgers and Hart, however, have been better remembered for their well-crafted individual songs, many of which became standards. In numerous interpretations by jazz and popular artists, tunes like “Manhattan,” “Any Old Place with You,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” obtained success quite apart from their shows of origin. For this reason, Symonds’s fresh examination of the duo’s songs within their original dramatic contexts is very welcome indeed. In his own careful analysis and with reference to previous work (particularly that of Geoffrey Block and Graham Wood), he illustrates early examples of integrating techniques.¹ In the show Poor Little Ritz Girl (1920), for instance, Symonds traces the pair’s increasing use of “dialogic” writing, a process in which lines of dialogue are embedded into lyrics of the songs. The result is perhaps a smoother transition between spoken dialogue and song and the creation of complete musical scenes. Although, as Symonds notes, this practice isn’t unique in theatrical songwriting of the time, it does illustrate the pair’s increasing dramatic sophistication.

Symonds also documents the essential contributions of the pair’s close friend Herbert Fields, who wrote the books to many of their shows, in facilitating a more integrated aesthetic. As Symonds convincingly shows, the three worked together so closely in the collaborative process that omitting Fields from closer study presents a serious disservice. In a detailed analysis of the show Chee-Chee (1928), Symonds illustrates the growing complexity and at times experimental approach that Rodgers and Hart (and Fields) took toward integrating songs and book. It is also cause for the colorful chapter title “Castration and Integration,” which makes reference to the musical’s protagonist, Li Pi Tchou, who struggles to avoid an undesired...