CHAPTER 15 | THE BROADWAY MUSICAL THROUGH WORLD WAR II 373
Oklahoma! was also a response to the United States’ involvement in World
War II, which dominated the national consciousness in 1943. While it may
be exaggerating to call it a patriotic musical, Rodgers later commented that
the show, featuring country folk from the past with an uncomplicated view
of life, aimed to give wartime audiences both pleasure and optimism. These
Oklahomans, the show implied, embodied the spirit that would carry the
nation through bad times. At a historical moment when the world seemed mad
with aggression and brutality, Oklahoma! struck a responsive chord by offering
audiences a vision of Americans as good-hearted people in a land fi lled with
promise for the future.
The aesthetic of the integrated musical such as Oklahoma! is at fi rst sight
no different from that of opera and operetta, where music’s dramatic func-
tion has always been paramount. The similarity is not surprising, considering
Hammerstein’s background in operetta and as the lyricist-librettist for Show Boat,
that most operetta-like of musicals. Even in setting and subject matter, some of
the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals indulge in operetta’s preference for
the long ago and faraway—the South Pacifi c, Siam, Austria, and (remote at least
for 1940s urbanites) Oklahoma Territory circa 1900. Perhaps the most impor-
tant distinction, then, between operetta and integrated musical is the latter’s
more insistent demand for songs with the potential to live on as independent
popular hits, both as vocal numbers and as instrumentals for social dancing.
Rodgers and Hammerstein brought great ingenuity to the challenge of meeting
that demand and at the same time fulfi lling the dramatic requirements of the
integrated musical.
Their ingenuity is evident in “People Will Say We’re in Love” (LG 15.3), which
appeared on Billboard magazine’s popular hit charts three times in 1943, in ver-
sions by Bing Crosby and Trudy Erwin (peaking at number 2), Frank Sinatra (at
number 3), and Hal Goodman’s dance band (number 11; for more on Billboard
and music charts, see chapter 17). “People Will Say We’re in Love” has subse-
quently been recorded dozens of times by jazz singers and instrumentalists.
As it appears in Oklahoma! the song displays Hammerstein’s deftness in han-
dling what can be an awkward moment in musical theater: the transition from
speaking to singing. The scene begins with fl irtatious banter between Laurey
and Curly, whose budding romance has been the subject of gossiping neigh-
bors. Their spoken lines are fi lled with folksy locutions intended to evoke the
American West. Laurey declares that “most of the talk is that you’re stuck on
me.” Curly responds, “Cain’t imagine how these ugly rumors start,” and, as Lau-
rey replies “Me neither,” four soft chords in the strings signal the beginning of
the song.
Those chords lead directly into the fi rst verse, whose long poetic lines,
though metered and rhymed, sustain the conversational tone, but not the rustic
dialect, of the preceding dialogue. Rodgers sets these pattering lines in a quick,
speechlike rhythm. At the chorus, the lyrics shift to shorter lines (from thirteen
syllables to six or seven) and a more elevated tone (e.g., “Your eyes mustn’t glow
like mine”), inspiring Rodgers to craft a melody with long notes that trace soar-
ing melodic arcs. Although the chorus follows the standard aaba format, the fi rst
two a sections are double the usual length—sixteen bars in place of the usual
eight—adding to the chorus’s expansive mood.
In sum, the verse has functioned as a way station between the dialogue’s
homespun local color and the chorus’s rhapsodic expression of romantic love.operetta and musicalLG 15.3172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 373 23/01/13 8:36 PM