also among the musicals that connect with the broadly popular
forms of song-and-dance entertainment that gave rise to the
genre in the first place. Rodgers and Hammerstein are the piv-
otal figures who turned those popular forms into a genre with
a future, and that future has political and social relevance.
The Better Book
What happened by the time of Oklahoma!was not the integra-
tion of musical numbers into a unified whole with the book, it
was a better book. Many of the successful earlier shows had
scanty plots—mere scaffoldings, really, for hanging songs and
dances on. They enjoyed the air of the ridiculous in the first
place—flappers flapping about at a rich man’s birthday party
while one of them sallies forth and falls in love with the local
cross-Atlantic aviator. This is the first act of the Gershwins’
Funny Face(1927, book by Fred Thompson and Paul Gerard
Smith). The rich man having the birthday party was played by
Fred Astaire and the flapper meeting up with the aviator was
played by Adele Astaire, Fred’s sister. The characters played by
the Astaires in the early shows could have crossed over from
one book to another with not much more than a change of
name. The Astaire characters were multiple characters, I has-
ten to add, characters doubled because of their extraordinary
penchant for song and dance. Their book selves were forget-
table, ditzy and inconsequential excuses to give the number
selves a chance to shine when they were enlarged into song
and dance. The enlargements into song and dance were stun-
ning pieces of theatre. They demanded hours of rehearsal, and
when the songs caught on, they emerged out of the show in
the form of recordings, by the Astaires and others. Some are
still being recorded today.
The books of the standard shows were always comedies, ro-
mantic comedies in their conclusions and would-be farces in
their pacing. Often they contained a kind of inner revue—a
nightclub scene, a ballroom scene, a garden party scene, a the-
atre scene—episodes that allowed singers, dancers, and comics