ALLEGRO History

By Bert Fink

They had triumphed their first time out, with OKLAHOMA! in 1943. Two years later they exceeded expectations with CAROUSEL, and, in that same year, charmed Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for STATE FAIR. They had also begun producing: first John Van Druten’s play I REMEMBER MAMA, then Irving Berlin’s blockbuster ANNIE GET YOUR GUN and a tour of SHOW BOAT. By now they were practically deified for making hits by taking chances, and in 1947 composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist/librettist Oscar Hammerstein II seemed as eager as everyone else to see what they would come up with next.

The result was ALLEGRO. Preceded by a mammoth publicity fanfare and the largest advance sale in Broadway history, ALLEGRO opened at the Majestic Theatre in New York on October 10, 1947. Drawing a critical reaction unlike any other in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon, before or since, ALLEGRO proved controversial.

“A work of great beauty and purity,” declared Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. “A very grave disappointment, and out-right failure,” pronounced Louis Kronenberger in PM. To Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror, ALLEGRO seemed “perfect and great.” To George Jean Nathan in the New York Journal-American it was “as pretentious as artificial jewelry and just about as valuable.”

Within the context of this critical brouhaha, the show itself remains a fascinating study, as contradictory as the reactions to it. Plot and theme may have been naïve, but the score, structure and staging were absolutely ahead of their time. Hammerstein had brought the idea of ALLEGRO to Rodgers and it was the first of only two original musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein not adapted from another source (the other being ME & JULIET in 1953). Hammerstein had conceived it as an allegory traveling from birth to death, in which he chose to make his Everyman a doctor. ALLEGRO tackles very real concerns about the medical profession: dilemmas that doctors face when a patient’s needs conflict with a hospital’s agenda, the role of big business in medicine, and a doctor’s responsibility to his own community. Rodgers, whose brother and father both practiced medicine, shared his partner’s interest in these issues.

As ALLEGRO began to take shape (with the first-draft storyline of cradle-to-grave truncated to cradle-to-midlife crisis), it became obvious that a new approach in script and style would be required to carry the ambitious story. It needed to move effortlessly through time and place; the allegory could only unfold in an atmosphere of total freedom. Both authors acknowledged that their inspiration was Thornton Wilder’s classic of nine years earlier, OUR TOWN, which had freed commercial theater from many of its conventions. ALLEGRO shares with OUR TOWN a common setting (small town America in a simpler time), the use of structural and narrative devices and, above all, a minimalist approach to the design.

Having written the rules on the musical play, Rodgers and Hammerstein now set out to break them. ALLEGRO’s score, for example, is filled with innovation, starting from its delicate weaving of song and dialogue, a technique first tried in OKLAHOMA! and perfected in the Bench Scene (“If I Loved You”) from CAROUSEL. In ALLEGRO, fragments of song move in and out of the action like passing thoughts; melodies flit by in one scene only to take hold and blossom in the next. Breaking another rule, big numbers like So Far and The Gentleman is a Dope are given to supporting characters while leads like the hero himself have comparatively little solo work. Also unusual is the presence of a Greek chorus shadowing the cast and requisite corps de ballet, giving insight into the plot, commenting on the action and speaking the character’s inner thoughts aloud.

The result was a musical unlike anything that had come before, and it demanded staging equally bold and original. Its fluid blend of score, dance, and book, for instance, required the director and choreographer to think and work as one… in fact, the director and choreographer would have to be one. So Rodgers and Hammerstein asked the innovative creator of their ballets for OKLAHOMA! and CAROUSEL, Agnes de Mille, to do double-duty. The position of director-choreographer was unprecedented; offering it to a woman was extraordinary. Agnes de Mille said yes.

Conceptually, ALLEGRO was a simple show. But simplicity in the theater can be awfully complicated. Jo Mielziner’s sets and lighting achieved an illusion of effortless motion through a complex system of treadmills, moving platforms, screen and projections supporting a highly sophisticated lighting plot (the first time lighting served as the principal staging factor in a Broadway musical). Added to the massive production budget was a weekly payroll for forty stagehands, eighteen principal actors, twenty-one supporting players, twenty-two dancers, thirty-eight singers and thirty-five musicians. ALLEGRO was not only expansive but expensive.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s fourth collaboration opened at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven on September 1, 1947, and traveled from there to Boston before opening in New York, where expectations were extraordinarily high. Following OKLAHOMA!, CAROUSEL and STATE FAIR was a tough assignment; landing on the covers of Life, Time, and other publications didn’t make it any easier. Avid theatergoers, having to wait years for their chance to see the other Rodgers and Hammerstein stage shows, were determined not to be left out in the cold this time. They snapped up tickets to ALLEGRO in record-setting numbers, resulting in the largest advance sale in history: $750,000 on a $4.50 top ticket price, at a time when a $100,000 advance was considered astronomical.

The advance sale helped for a while, as did the good and great reviews (of which, contrary to common assumption, there were quite a few). But the bad reviews hurt and, more importantly, so did word-of-mouth. By July of 1948, less than ten months after it arrived, ALLEGRO was gone. The show failed to pay back its original production costs, and a national tour that visited 16 cities from November ’48 to June of ’49 didn’t fare much better, either critically or financially.

Why? The simplest explanation is that, as the old theater adage goes, the audience is never wrong. “The fault was ours,” conceded Rodgers in his autobiography Musical Stages, “for not stating our point of view more clearly.” Hammerstein stood by his theme but acknowledged, “if the writer’s aim is misread it can only be because he hasn’t written clearly enough.” Still, he believed that personal fulfillment should be pursued despite all obstacles and, in his introduction to the published script, added tersely, “That is the simple reason why ALLEGRO was written. If you don’t like that reason, you won’t like ALLEGRO.&rdquo

To many, though, ALLEGRO came across as a “success corrupts” morality play in which the wholesome virtues of America’s heartland were set against the graft and greed in the Big Bad City. “We, of course, intended no such conclusion to be drawn from our play,” said Hammerstein, but reactions such as Irwin Shaw’s of the New Republic were typical: “All I can conclude is that Rodgers and Hammerstein bitterly regret being the richest and most successful people in American theater…they have sacrificed themselves in a cause they don’t believe in.”

Perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein the Authors were overshadowed by Rodgers and Hammerstein the Producers (although the Theater Guild produced ALLEGRO, theirs was a credit in name only…Rodgers and Hammerstein were really calling the shots). Judging by the results, they seemed more concerned with style than substance, more fascinated by the possibilities of the staging than the music and story itself. And yet, the chances taken in ALLEGRO did pay off: not for the show itself and, arguably, not even for Rodgers and Hammerstein, but certainly for the American musical. While OKLAHOMA! and CAROUSEL changed the course of the musical overall, ALLEGRO no less importantly signaled the start of a powerful new genre: the concept musical. Reverberations of ALLEGRO resound to this day: from a fragmented score (GRAND HOTEL) and seamless staging (DREAMGIRLS) to the introspective use of dance (WEST SIDE STORY) and chorus (A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC), from the thematic (COMPANY) to the metaphoric (A CHORUS LINE). ALLEGRO was, in the words of the original production’s go-fer, Stephen Sondheim, “the first really good experimental show.”

But the effects of ALLEGRO’s achievements were not to be seen in Hammerstein’s lifetime. And he and Rodgers were left to ponder what was, by any standard definition, their first failure. It would haunt them both for the rest of their lives. “I’m going back to the ALLEGRO idea,” Hammerstein told the New Yorker in 1951, “it’s still churning inside me.” He was working on a television version of it when he died in the summer of 1960. Rodgers, thirty years after ALLEGRO opened on Broadway, wrote in his autobiography: “Of all the musicals I ever worked on that didn’t quite succeed, ALLEGRO is the one I think most worthy of a second chance. From time to time, various ideas for revising ALLEGRO have been proposed, and though none so far has seemed feasible, I still keep hoping.”