Rodgers & Hammerstein in the South Pacific

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

What's going on, California?

It's Bluff here.

You know what's better than a relaxing day at the beach?

A relaxing day at the beach with SpinQuest.com, America's number one social casino, with over a thousand slots and table games available to the comfort of your own phone, with instant cash prize redemptions, and new users get a $30 coin package for only 10 bucks.

That's SPINQUEST.com.

I'll see you there.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit spendquest.com for more details.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certapro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

You're about to listen to a brand new series of History's Heroes.

New episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early, first on BBC Sounds.

Though the lights were dim, the ornate gold and white decoration around the stage of Broadway's majestic theatre shimmered.

The auditorium was one of the largest in New York City.

Two men were not just watching the show, but the audience.

Their reaction meant everything.

The pair were composer Richard Rogers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein.

They'd booked a party after the performance on the roof of the glamorous St.

Regis Hotel, and they'd ordered 200 copies of the next day's New York Times in the hope it would carry a positive review.

The audience was packed with the city's socialites, businessmen, and patrons of the arts.

All of this felt precarious.

Rogers and Hammerstein's last show had received mixed reviews and a lukewarm reception.

It's not as if every time they put pen to paper, you know, miracles came forth.

They couldn't afford another flop.

Backstage, makeup artists and costume fitters flapped around in a dressing room papered with images of tropical plants.

On the dressing table was a soft toy sailor for good luck.

That night, the 7th of April 1949, they needed it.

The new show was called South Pacific.

It wasn't just a musical, but a radical piece of activism holding a mirror up to the racial prejudices of American society.

And what it showed wasn't pretty.

They were basically telling the audience in 1949, here's what the next decade is going to be all about.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes: people with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and today it's a pair of surprising heroes, Rogers and Hammerstein.

In a world where it would have been easy and lucrative to flatter and coddle American audiences, they didn't just give the people what they wanted.

Instead, they challenged them.

Well, I grew up in New York.

My father, Schuyler Chapin, had a variety of jobs in the arts in New York.

My brothers and I were invited to see shows, concerts, operas, ballets, you name it.

And I just loved it.

And I thought, oh, I want to be a part of that world.

Ted Chapin made that happen.

Early on, I realized that if I figured out what shows were rehearsing during the summer, I could offer my services as a production assistant and get coffee and if necessary, you know, put scripts together.

And so I did.

The first one I did was when I was 16 years old.

Every part of the process of making a musical enthralled him.

How to create an evening with characters, situations, songs that add up to something was based on instinct.

And they were top drawer musical theater artists doing it, which is why watching it and being part of it was just unbelievably exciting.

In 1981, when Ted was 30, a telephone call came through from a family friend.

And she said, what are you doing?

I think they could use you at the Rogers and Hammerstein office.

Here's the number.

Here's the guy to call.

I'll see you later.

The friend on the other end of the line was Mary Rogers, daughter of Richard Rogers.

It was after Richard Rogers died and the Rogers family and the Hammerstein family had no idea what they were going to do and who they were going to get to run the office that the two men had established.

Chapin was taken on to help manage the musical theatre properties of the late Richard Rogers and his his longtime collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II, who'd died in 1960.

Rogers and Hammerstein were two of the most influential musical theatre creators of all time, but by the 1980s they were seen as a bit conservative, maybe even a little cheesy.

Musical theatre can communicate it in ways that I think no other art form can on sort of all levels, emotional, intellectual, visceral.

And so I will stand up and say I still think it's cool.

It didn't start that way.

Both men grew up in Jewish families in Harlem, New York City, then a prosperous neighborhood.

Richard Rogers was born into a family of Russian immigrants who changed their surname from Rogozinski.

Oscar Hammerstein's grandfather was from Germany.

At first in New York, he worked in a cigar factory, but he became a theater impresario.

His grandfather, Oscar I, was the first person to build a theater uptown where no theaters were in what is now the Broadway Theatre District.

For Hammerstein, theater was in his blood.

As a child, he'd become literally sick with excitement when he saw a show on stage.

Though Rogers and Hammerstein played in the same parks as children, they didn't meet until they were both backstage at Columbia University's annual varsity show in the 1910s.

You wrote for the varsity show if you were interested in writing for the musical theater.

That was one of the sort of nay plus ultra things to do.

It was absolutely a place to try to get to and get your stuff in, because it was frankly on Broadway of all ludicrous things.

Even though they both worked on student shows, each man found his own writing partner.

Rogers began to compose with the lyricist Lorenz Hart, while Hammerstein wrote lyrics with the composer Jerome Kern.

They would, you know, see each other every now and then.

They were not pals,

but they were both devoted and dedicated to the musical theater.

They loved it.

They had a great deal in common.

Strong-minded, passionate, positive people.

Hammerstein was more of an overtly political animal than Richard Rogers.

Rogers was quieter.

He was quieter about his political feelings.

In 1927, Hammerstein and Jerome Kern explored the highly controversial theme of interracial marriage in their groundbreaking musical, Showboat.

The granddaddy of the American Musical Theatre.

When Showboat opened on Broadway, the big numbers drew little applause.

Some of the audience left the theatre as though they were relieved to escape, yet the critics adored it.

Hammerstein wrote the song Ole Man River for the black civil rights activist and actor Paul Robeson, who later performed the role in New York, Los Angeles and London.

Showboat may look dated today, but in its time it was a runaway success and gave Hammerstein confidence that he could take on serious subjects in a musical form.

In Europe, fascism was on the rise.

Hammerstein was among the first in Hollywood to take a stand against Nazi Germany, coming together with others to form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he helped set up the Writers' War Board, an American anti-Nazi propaganda organization.

In 1943, these two men who led parallel lives came together again.

Both Rogers and Hammerstein were independently interested in adapting a stage show called Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical, but their usual collaborators weren't enthusiastic, so Rogers and Hammerstein talked.

At that meeting, Rogers said, at some point I want to do a show that you write with me because I think it could be deeper and more interesting than the shows that I've been writing.

So this thing came up and neither Lorenz Hart nor Jerome Kern were the slightest bit interested in doing this show, musical of Green Grow the Lilacs.

The result was a smash hit.

Oklahoma.

It played for more than 2,000 performances on Broadway and was the first ever musical to have an original cast recording.

And they didn't know or think they were writing something that was going to be perceived as revolutionary.

You know, the whole idea of having a dance that would be full of subtext.

Sure, let's give it a whirl.

So in a way, what's kind of miraculous is it turned out there was some magic alchemy.

between these two creative artists sitting together in a room, talking about a specific show, going off, doing the words in the one hand and the music in the other, coming together with this extraordinarily unified work.

They followed it with another hit, Carousel.

Suddenly, Rogers and Hammerstein were the golden guys of Broadway.

And they had another thing in common.

Both Rogers and Hammerstein, ironically, had wives named Dorothy who couldn't have been more different.

Dorothy Rogers was formidable.

She was very aware of society.

She liked her position.

Dorothy Hammerstein had been a chorus girl from Tasmania.

She was fun-loving, interesting.

They were both interior designers.

But after Carousel, their next show, Allegro, fell flat.

The New Yorker called it a shocking disappointment.

They wanted to innovate further.

And the idea was on every man, and they wanted a Greek chorus to speak some text, and

they wanted all the things they'd had in Oklahoma and Carousel, but they wanted even more, and they wanted to do it in the they wanted to push the theatricality even further.

And it didn't work.

Allegro was a flop.

Rogers and Hammerstein lost their golden sheen.

Now they had to prove themselves all over again.

The show prior to South Pacific was a failure.

Now,

if the next show was not a success, they would be sort of a two-show wonder.

January 1949.

Richard Rogers hung up the telephone and slid his hand down the keys of his piano.

Hammerstein was fussing over who should sing the lyrics for a song.

Rogers just wanted to get it right.

He was the more introverted of the two.

Hammerstein was outgoing.

The kind of person who everybody wanted to honor, to sit on committees, to be on boards of directors, that kind of stuff.

The two men were not particularly close.

Hammerstein wrote lyrics at his farm in Pennsylvania or in his Manhattan townhouse.

Rogers wrote his music in his own Manhattan apartment or at his country house in Connecticut.

In fact, unless they were in rehearsal, they communicated by telegram or telephone.

The partnership was always 50-50.

They clearly respected each other.

No question about that.

Rogers reread his composition.

There was much much still to do.

He stretched his fingers out to start playing the piano again, but heard his children outside his study door.

He had told them they could be around as long as they kept quiet.

In truth, he felt guilty.

He was a womanizer.

He wasn't alone in that in those days.

There were times when he, you know, went away to some place to sort of dry out, because he also, you know, drank a lot.

Rogers wanted the song to be perfect.

The point was not just artistic, but moral.

Rogers and Hammerstein were writing something provocative again.

It was only four years since the end of the Second World War.

The war was part of America changing and having a focus that things were going to get better.

And unfortunately, in order for them to get better, we needed to join this fight that was not on our shores.

Their new production was adapted from a book called Tales of the South Pacific by James A.

Michner.

It was set during the war on a Tonkinese island in the Pacific Ocean among American troops resisting the Japanese.

The cast was diverse, including mixed-race relationships and families.

The reason Rogers and Hammerstein were so interested in the material is that they could use it to tackle the issue of American racism head on.

For Hammerstein, this was personal.

He'd always advocated for civil rights, but now his own family was racially diverse, and they had felt the sharpe end of prejudice in the United States.

Before the war, his sister-in-law Doody married a businessman called Jerry Watanabe, who was half Japanese and half British.

When the war came, Watanabe was interned at Ellis Island, along with many Japanese Americans who were suspected of being in sympathy with the enemy.

Hammerstein tried to get Doody's daughter into school, but the school refused on grounds of her Japanese heritage.

After Jerry was released, he couldn't find work.

Dorothy Hammerstein took him on to do the accounts for her decorating business.

Hammerstein felt these injustices deeply.

That same year, he co-founded an organization to find homes for abandoned mixed-race children of American servicemen, many of whom were the offspring of broken wartime romances.

And actually, Oscar's daughter Alice.

Her two kids were adopted from that place.

Hammerstein was so dedicated to the fight against racism that he joined the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, or NAACP.

With South Pacific, though, he hoped to make his point on a stage.

It was a huge risk in a divided America.

The only person who had complete faith in the production was the writer of the book it was based on, James Michner.

He could see Rogers and Hammerstein were determined to prove themselves after the failure of Allegro.

Those fellows are so mad, he said, they could make a great musical out of three pages of the Bronx telephone directory.

It's Bretzky, baby, and I don't know why they let me on the radio, but I do know you're in California, which means you can play on SpinQuest.com.

With over a thousand slots and table games, absolutely free, and with the ability to win real cash prizes with instant redemptions, your first $30 coin package is only $10 today.

Hurry up, SpinQuest.com.

SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway.

Spooky season is quickly approaching, so time to stock up on all your favorite treats.

Now, through October 7th, you can get early savings on your Halloween candy favorites when you shop in-store and online.

Save on items like Hershey's, Reese's, Pumpkins, Snickers, miniatures, Tootsie Rolls, raw sugar, milk, chocolate, caramel, jack-o'-lanterns, Brock's candy corn, charms, mini pops, and more.

Off friends, October 7th.

Restrictions apply, offers may vary.

Visit Safeway.com for more details.

On the 2nd of February 1949, Oscar Hammerstein strolled into the Belasco Theatre on Broadway, twirling his trademark signet ring.

It was the first day of rehearsals for South Pacific.

In the patriotic political climate after the war, presenting a show about American racism could have been considered foolhardy, but Rogers and Hammerstein were committed to their cause.

Each reassured his Dorothy that this show was necessary.

It was a piece of activism, as well as a showcase for exceptional talent.

They did a couple of things that they hadn't done before.

They took on in Joshua Logan a major creative force in his own right as a director and co-writer.

They wrote the leading role of Nurse Nelly for rising Broadway star Mary Martin.

As her love interest, the French planter Emile, they cast Italian opera star Ezio Pinza.

Pinzer had also been interned in Ellis Island during the war, suspected wrongly of supporting Benito Mussolini.

So they kind of stacked the deck by doing all these things, but also challenged themselves.

Heroes don't necessarily need to do it by themselves.

The real heroes understand how they fit into the whole.

In the show, Nellie, a young nurse from the segregated state of Arkansas, falls in love with Emile.

He's older than her and has a complicated past.

Back in France, he killed a man.

In the South Pacific, he married a local woman and had two half-Tonkinese children before she died.

Nellie is surprisingly relaxed when she finds out about the murder, but is horrified when she learns Emile's late wife was Tonkinese.

That is when she walks out on him.

Rogers and Hammerstein knew that to make their leading lady a racist was extremely risky.

Interracial marriage was still illegal in the majority of American states, and many people, like Nelly, thought it morally wrong.

How would those Americans react to their views being depicted as backward?

Far from playing down the controversy, Rogers and Hammerstein added a second interracial love story.

On the enchanting island of Bali High, American Lieutenant Joe Cable falls passionately in love with a Tonkinese woman, Liat.

He feels he can't marry her because of her race, but relents in a song called, You've Got to Be Carefully Taught.

Short, but very powerful.

It takes about a minute.

It is not a lecture.

But a character who's from Philadelphia, who doesn't realize he's prejudiced until confronted with a situation where he is resistant to a girl of another race.

And they wrote this song for this guy to sing, which basically is saying prejudice has to be taught.

It is not born in you.

Rehearsals were hard work.

The men of the cast were sent to West 42nd Street for their costumes, where there was a row of military surplus shops that fitted them out for $50 all in.

Rogers and Hammerstein kept making changes to the show, even as it began previews in New Haven and Boston.

For Pinzer, it was all a bit much.

He was used to the operatic world where a role never changed once it had been learned.

Rogers and Hammerstein sought feedback, including from Essie Robeson, the wife of Paul Robeson, for whom Oscar Hammerstein had written Old Man River.

Essie saw an early preview and wrote to ask why Archie Savage, the only black cast member among the American troops, was always dancing the jitterbug.

She wrote, It is very possible that I am unduly sensitive racially, but so are a lot of us, and it would help enormously that if just once he appeared with his comrades not cutting up.

Hammerstein wrote back, since you have seen the play and before I received your letter, we have inserted an episode in which Archie Savage is not jitterbugging.

On the 7th of April 1949, Rogers and Hammerstein walked through the front doors of Broadway's majestic theatre.

They'd thrown everything at this production.

Would it pay off?

There are a couple of key moments in Rogers and the Hammerstein shows when you could hear a pin drop in the theater, because it's been crafted in such a way that the audience doesn't know exactly how that moment is going to come out, even

if it's a show that's familiar and people do know how it's going to come out.

As the final scene of South Pacific began to unfold, Rogers and Hammerstein waited for the audience to see Nelly confront her own racial prejudice.

It is extraordinary on so many levels because

the woman from the prejudiced South has come to realize that her prejudice is not what should be her operating mode.

She has overcome it and expresses her love for this guy who she had kind of rejected.

Emile has gone on a special mission, and Nelly believes he's been killed.

She realizes that her attitude to his previous marriage was ridiculous.

What piffle, she says.

What a pinhead I was.

Her gesture, which is kind of remarkable, is to go to the house where these two multiracial children, which is what caused her to freak out,

where they are.

So she goes over to them, and it's an it's

if he's gone, she realizes that one of the things that she must do for him is to help raise his children because they don't have a mother and evidence.

So that's where the scene starts and then

he shows up because the fact is he hasn't been killed.

And that last scene is just breathtaking.

The audience applauded for so long that the players couldn't get off the stage.

Rogers and Hammerstein had a third massive hit on their hands.

The party at the St.

Regis went with a bang, and nobody regretted ordering 200 copies of the New York Times.

It just hit the Zeitgeist at a moment in time that was extraordinary.

The team of Rogers and Hammerstein just reached their apex of skill, of talent, and success.

As Rogers and Hammerstein had expected, though, the song You've Got to Be Carefully Taught was met with a mixed response.

A lot of people, and smart people,

not

unsmart people, felt the song was too strong and too in your face.

People thought it was and accepted it as it.

And Rogers and Hammerstein resisted people who said, it's too preachy.

And there were some very smart letters from people urging Oscar to cut the song for traumatic reasons, for, you know, the point that the song makes is already made, one of the letters says.

Rogers and Hammerstein stood firm and said, sorry, sorry, it's part of our show.

As well as a sell-out run on Broadway, South Pacific went on tour across the United States in 1950.

It had been a success in New York, but how would it play in the segregated South?

When the tour went to Georgia, the state of Georgia, a hotbed of southern prejudice and racism, the local government passed a mandate rejecting the show and rejecting the song as an influence from Moscow.

They were that angry about it.

I mean, this is communist propaganda.

After seeing South Pacific in Atlanta, two Georgia state lawmakers were outraged.

They claimed the song criticizing racism as unnatural was offensive.

A defiant Hammerstein wrote to the press, I meant every word in that song.

You know, if people objected to that and therefore weren't going to go to South Pacific, they could go to other shows.

In the 1950s, both Oklahoma and Carousel were adapted into hit Hollywood movies.

South Pacific followed in 1958.

There was, again, pressure to cut, You've Got to Be Carefully Taught.

Rogers and Hammerstein risked the entire film by insisting the song Stay In.

When the Rogers and Hammerstein families sold everything in the 2000s, in the purchase and sale agreement, Alice Hammerstein insisted that that song never be cut from a production of South Pacific, sort of echoing what her father and Richard Rogers felt during their lifetime.

And she said, to the extent that I can continue to honor my father, do not cut that song from South Pacific.

Today, not everyone admires South Pacific.

Oscar Hammerstein said he wanted one of the Tonkinese characters, Bloody Mary, to talk like a woman who learnt English from sailors.

The audience is encouraged to laugh at her mistakes.

Jo's love interest, Liat, is so flimsily written that she doesn't have any lines at all.

The show has little that is insightful to say about Tonkinese culture, and that is intentional.

Richard Rogers wrote at the time, In the whole score, there are only two songs that could be considered native.

These are sung by a Tonkinese woman and here I made no attempt whatsoever to be authentic or realistic.

The music is simply my impression of the woman and her surroundings in the same sense that a painter might give you the impression of a bowl of flowers rather than provide a photographic resemblance.

South Pacific may not have much to say about the South Pacific, but it had plenty to say about America.

In a time of segregation, it made an earnest, heartfelt claim that racism could be overcome and love could conquer hate.

It became the biggest success of Rogers and Hammerstein's career to that point.

South Pacific made even more money than the smash hit Oklahoma.

It swept the Tony Awards.

It was named best musical at the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards.

It even won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Rogers and Hammerstein wrote a new musical every other year between 1943 and 1959, including the blockbuster hits The King and I, Cinderella, and The Sound of Music.

There was an alchemy of brilliance that they brought things out in each other that made their talents and their position in life more important.

I know it sounds silly to say writing musical theater, but the themes that are in their shows were so important

to America and the world in that time that people were able to

take on

shows and learn amazing things from them.

From BBC Radio 4 and the History Podcast.

We're lots of funny people in our family.

I'm Joe Dunthorne.

Funny people.

And this is Half-Life.

She finished her job, she dropped dead.

My father finished his job, he was dead within a week.

I mean, that's all quite a weird set of story, Donald.

And so we call it like the curse of this memoir.

An eight-part podcast about how the past lives on inside us.

I wonder how you feel after all of this.

Even when we try to ignore it.

All of the bombs will detonate sooner or later.

Listen to Half-Life on BBC Sounds.

Hard water makes it hard to keep your home looking like the work of art you've always envisioned it would be.

Culligan softeners reduce hard water buildup and your cleaning time, transforming every drop, every splash, every rinse into the fine art of a long-lasting clean.

With a Culligan water softener, revel in the breathtaking beauty of your home just the way you've always pictured it.

Color water you love.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with Certopro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certipro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.