Tuesday 11 June 2024

It’s not about being smart, it’s about being alive

Rogers and Hammerstein changed Broadway. They took it forward by making it less a geographical location where hits were born, and more a standalone genre with new rules and regulations. With their exotic but defiantly non-metropolitan locations, they also took it back to a time when the book drove the songs, back to the time of light opera and operetta. … Certainly, ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ didn’t have the urban smarts of Rogers and Hart, but as Sondheim himself later responded, ‘It’s not about being smart, it’s about being alive.’

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 436

No comments:

Post a Comment