Rodgers And Hammerstein Quotes

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?

Climb every mountain, Ford every stream, Follow every rainbow, 'Till you find your dream. A dream that will need All the love you can give, Every day of your life For as long as you live

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you? Am I making believe I see in you, a woman too perfect to be really true? Do I want you because you're wonderful, or are you wonderful because I want you? Are you the sweet invention of a lover's dream, or are you really as beautiful as you seem?

Lots of people imagine wrongly that 'My Favorite Things' is one of my compositions; I would have loved to have written it, but it's by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Show tunes are great. Stephen Sondheim. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Wicked. Rent. The Music Man. Almost any musical will do. Except Cats.” “Why? Doesn’t it shut out the voices?” “No, it shuts them out fine. But it’s a terrible musical.

You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year, It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught.

The history of popular music is littered with great partnerships. Rodgers had his Hammerstein, Lennon had his McCartney, and Lloyd Webber had… his photocopier…

One thing he had to give her credit for, she'd never called it a Relationship. "What is it then, hey," he'd asked once. "A secret," with her small child's smile, which like Rodgers and Hammerstein in 3/4 time rendered Profane fluttery and gelatinous.

One of the foster carers kept a video library of musicals that we worked our way through en famille at weekends, and so, although I fervently wish that I wasn’t, I’m very familiar with the work of Lionel Bart, Rodgers and Hammerstein et al. Knowing I was here on the street where he lived was giving me a funny feeling, fluttery and edgy, verging on euphoric. I could almost understand why that frock-coated buffoon from My Fair Lady had felt the need to bellow about it outside Audrey Hepburn’s window.

Libby, not all the gays have an encyclopedic knowledge of the American musical theater. It's not like they hand you a DVD box set of of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Collection in a Liza Minnelli souvenir tote bag when you come out.' 'Well, they should. I'd totally be gay for a Liza Minnelli tote bag.

The sun has gone To bed and so must I

She climbs a tree And scrapes her knee Her dress has got a tear. She waltzes on her way to mass And whistles on the stair. And underneath her wimple She has curlers in her hair! Maria's not an asset to the abbey. She's always late for chapel, But her penitence is real. She's always late for everything! Except for every meal. I hate to have to say it But I very firmly feel Maria's not an asset to the abbey! I'd like to say a word on her behalf. Maria makes me laugh. How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet! A will o' the wisp! A clown! Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her, Many a thing she ought to understand. But how do you make her stay And listen to all you say, How do you keep a wave upon the sand? Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? When I'm with her I'm confused Out of focus and bemused, And I never know exactly where I am. Unpredictable as weather, She's as flighty as a feather, She's a darling, She's a demon, She's a lamb. She'd out-pester any pest, Drive a hornet from his nest, She can throw a whirling dervish out of whirl. She is gentle, She is wild, She's a riddle. She's a child. She's a headache! She's an angel! She's a girl. How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet! A will o' the wisp! A clown! Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her, Many a thing she ought to understand. But how do you make her stay? And listen to all you say? How do you keep a wave upon the sand? Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? "Maria" from The Sound of Music

I’d like to quote the lyrics of Rodgers and Hammerstein—something that’s extremely easy to do when you’re in a library near 782.14 and all those magnificent Broadway show tunes—‘I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly!’ 

Oscar was forty-six years old, and his career in musical theater seemed at an end. In 1940 he and Dorothy had bought a seventy-two-acre cattle farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, two hours by car from Manhattan, where Broadway figures like George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart already had country homes. “I was pretty blue,” he would recall. “I just wanted to come down here to the farm and sit around and be alone and think. It’s not easy to hear people say the parade has passed you by.

Lieutenant Commander Thomas McWhorter of the navy, who fired off an early broadside against the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” asking that it be cut. “It is like drinking a scotch and soda and suddenly swallowing the ice cube!” McWhorter wrote. “You could not have interrupted the beautiful flow of entertainment any more effectively had you stopped the show for a VD lecture.” Oscar wrote back, “I believe I get the point of your letter very clearly, and I realize very well the dangers of overstating the case. But I just feel that the case is not fully stated without this song. I wish it were true that all these things are accepted by the public. You say, ‘the theme is wearing very thin,’ but in spite of this, I see progress being made only very slowly.

Despite this pressure, Rodgers and Hammerstein wouldn’t cut it—and if you license South Pacific legally, neither can you.

She can throw a whirling dervish out of whirl.

Modern visitors were often surprised to learn that the names and ages of the children were changed, three children were deleted from the story, and that “Edelweiss” was not a traditional Austrian folk song but was written by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1959. Those who consulted a map would ask how landlocked Austria had a navy and learn that the real-life Georg von Trapp had been a World War I submarine captain in the navy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which controlled the port city Trieste (now part of Italy) and the Slovenian and Croatian coasts. Tourists would also learn that escaping Nazi-dominated Austria by hiking to Switzerland is not an option, as the border is roughly two hundred miles away. In fact, locals chuckled at the film’s closing scene, as the family is depicted hiking in the direction toward Germany and the Kehlsteinhaus, known to Americans and the British as Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest.

On 22 November, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Parlophone released the band’s second album, With the Beatles. Advance orders of half a million put it instantly at the top of the UK album charts, so finally ending the seven-month reign there of Please Please Me. It would eventually sell one million copies, more than any album previously released in Britain except the cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

Although the degree to which Kiss Me, Kate employs the major-minor juxtapositions is perhaps unprecedented in a Porter show, the roots of this idea can be found in Porter’s pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Anything Goes (and many other songs;

Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City They've gone about as fur as they c'n go.

In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s familiar “A Wonderful Guy,” from South Pacific, the hard, alliterative consonants of the opening line, “corny” and “Kansas,” fall precisely on the downbeat of two successive measures. However interesting Rodgers’s waltz and Hammerstein’s simile, the two join in a musical-verbal conjunction that conveys the emphatic joy of the singer at that moment. Hammerstein knew that the anapests (“corny as,” “Kansas in”) were verbal equivalents of the waltz, which he emphasized with the crackling alliteration. Kansas is actually not very corny in August: Kansas is the wheat state and Iowa is the corn state. If you imagine “I’m as corny as Iowa in August,” you can hear the poetic, musical, and dramatic reasons for Hammerstein’s agricultural stretcher. Americans hear and, consequently, understand these verbal-musical bundles automatically; the words and music of the best American film and theater songs fit so snugly that their conjunction seems “natural.” Only by pulling words and music apart does one hear careful art coyly masquerading as simple nature.

if we are going to continue to be proud that we are Americans, there must be no weakening of the code by which we have lived; by the right to meet your accuser face to face, if you have one; by your right to go to the church or the synagogue or even the mosque of your own choosing; by your right to speak your mind and be protected in it. Ladies and gentlemen, the things that make us proud to be Americans are the soul and the spirit.

Indeed, this is the sort of show critics love to ghoul out on. It’s so romantic, so twice-told, so … yes: so corny. That’s the worst insult possible in a rock culture. The American Gone With the Wind, still in the Layton production but wholly recast with Lesley Ann Warren and Pernell Roberts in the leads, was to have opened in Los Angeles, toured for the better part of a year, then hit Broadway. But the California showing did not go over, and after San Francisco the show folded. We are losing important history here. Harold Rome’s career typifies the evolution of theatre music in the Golden Age, from hi-ho ditties to the dramatic sophistication of the “musical scene.” An invention of twenties operetta but not popularized till Rodgers and Hammerstein, the musical scene is what gives modern shows their depth and point. Isolated song spots are mostly gone; now the music breathes with the story.

Part of resisting the disease is captured in simply not letting the fear of tomorrow control the quality of today. The Rodgers and Hammerstein song from The King and I makes the point better than I can: I whistle a happy tune, and every single time, the happiness in the tune convinces me that I’m not afraid. Powering through the fear may seem like denial, but fear doesn’t change the prognosis. It only changes the way I would feel between now and whenever the inevitable occurs. So that is what I did.