Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution

by Todd S. Purdum

Even as a twelve-year-old boy in 1959, Timothy Crouse could sense the attitude inherent in the smart set’s dismissal of the show his father helped create. “I’m talking about people in the business who acted as if Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lindsay and Crouse were one of those big food conglomerates who do testing in the lab to create a snack with just the right combination of salt and fat and especially sugar to make it a tour de force of empty calories that consumers can’t stop eating,” Crouse says. “It was as if the four authors had sat around saying, ‘Oh, we’ll toss in so many grams of nuns, and so many grams of Nazis, and so many of adorable kiddies, and we’ll have the hit of all time.’ People really thought that. What these people were incapable of seeing was that the key ingredient of the secret sauce was sincerity. Whether or not you agree with the vision offered by The Sound of Music, it was a sincere vision, sincere on the part of all four guys. They believed in what they’d written.”