Abstract

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart collaborated on over 40 shows before Hart’s death, contributing dozens of classic hits to the Great American Songbook. We’ll Have Manhattan focuses on the early, formative period of the Rodgers & Hart collaboration, before the huge successes of the 1930s. From 1919, when they first met, until their brief flirtation with Hollywood in the early thirties, their output was prodigious, progressive and experimental. It is during this period that they developed their own characteristic style and an approach to writing for the musical stage that would be fundamental to the development of the Broadway musical. Despite this, despite the many celebrated songs of the period, and despite the many Broadway and West End successes they enjoyed, the 1920s shows remain little known, and several important archives of their work remain little explored. Not just a historical study of their first collaborative years, this book also offers an accessible but authoritative study of their material, documenting the early shows and providing a critical and analytical commentary on their developing practice and its influence on the subsequent development of the American musical.