Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution

by Todd S. Purdum

There’s a common misconception that you can stand on the top of a mountain and look at a sunset and sit down and write something beautiful. I don’t think it goes that way. I think the sunset, the mountain, the experience all go inside and may not come out for fifty years. But they become part of your knowledge, part of your personality … part of your education, part of your technique … and, eventually, you express yourself. Richard Rodgers

Rodgers once told an interviewer that art could be defined “as the expression of an emotion by means of a technique.”

The Broadway publicist Gary Stevens described Bender as “a very devious, nefarious, strange man,” who preyed on gay men, and dubbed him “Assputin.”

“Sometimes the audience writes your play for you, and rewrites it in the way you don’t want it re-written,” he would recall. “And if so, there is something wrong with you as a writer. It is as if a horse decides where he is going to take you, if he doesn’t feel a strong enough grip on his reins.”

I think the point is that it isn’t necessary to love one another. The necessity is to understand one another, because understanding, I think, is a block to hatred. We mustn’t hate one another. But love is not the only alternative. Oscar Hammerstein II

A bell is no bell till you ring it, A song is no song till you sing it, And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay— Love isn’t love Till you give it away …