Welcome to another video of my series: Flipping the Flops, in which I looks at musicals that
flopped, but musically and/or artistically still hold merit on their own.
Today we will look at Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro which opened in 1947.
This was their third collaboration after Oklahoma and Carousel.
Once again, the two tried to innovate theatre even further, but perhaps going too far.
For starters, it was perhaps too experimental for the average audience, used to seeing Oklahoma.
It was a true "concept" musical.
Author Ethan Mordden said that it was the very first musical ever that half the audience
thought it was best thing they've ever seen and the other half thought it was worst.
Additionally, It required 41 principals, 100 additional dancers, and
a huge crew and orchestra.
Agnes de Mille who was made famous by choreographing Oklahoma and Carousel was invited back to
direct as well.
Unfortunately, she was reportedly extremely abusive to the cast.
Since then, it hardly gets produced.
It also had a bummer of an ending.
It was recently on Off-Broadway, when legendary director John Doyle revived it.
In his John Doyle actor-musician style, he stripped the show down, cut the cast, shortened
the show, and had all the actors be the musicians as well.
Out of all the Rodgers and Hammersteins, Allegro is musically my favorite.
How the songs are presented and boy, those gorgeous dance numbers.
Allegro follows the story of an everyday man, Joseph Taylor Jr, following him from birth
to aged 35 as he grows up, interacts with the people around him, especially his love
interest, Jenny, and works towards working in medicine.
At the end of Act 1 he marries Jenny.
In act 2 they are no longer together, Joe is unhappy with his material success and treating
hypocondriacs at his own big city hospital.
He's tired of all the fast-paced action and the pointless jabbering at the cocktail parties
as this song in Act 2 reflects.
Finally, he heads back to his small home town to help his father run the small hospital.
Even though he's the focus of the story, he doesn’t sing much.
Many of the songs are sung by the people who come and go in his life, his grandmother,
his parents, Jenny's parents, his best friend Charlie, etc.
But, most of the show is narrated by an ensemble, a greek chorus, who narrate through very short-songs,
the happenings of Joseph.
Here's an example.
There are also many extended dance numbers scattered through-out such as a 6-minute ballet
near the beginning featured as a montage of children playing, and Joe, as a kid, playing
with them, and also playing with Jenny.
There's another dance sequence when he gets to college, as students gets whirled around
at a long college dance party.
It serves no purpose but to make a gag about how Joseph sucks at dancing.
There's one at the top of Act 2 at the song 'Money isn't Everything'.
That serves less of a purpose, except to allow Jenny to have an opportunity to dance.
Near the end of the show, they do another 7-minute ballet following the title song.
I especially love the dance music in the show, which was arranged by Trude Rittman, one of
the only females working in the industry at the time.
Now because we have a fully integrated musical, with dance as a focal point, the dance music
is allowed to soar.
Rittman did the dance arrangements for Carousel but not for Oklahoma, as Oklahoma didn't have
a designated dance arranger.
As much as love the dream ballet that ends the act 1 finale in Oklahoma, the music is
clunky.
One song ends and just goes into the next.
Listen to this awful transition.
However, in the 6-minute long Children's dance, there isn't a single part of the dance where
the melody concludes and a new totally unrelated melody begins.
Instead we have seamless transitions like this.
In another example, hear how Trude Rittman dwarfs Roger's melody to different dances.
This song in Allegro is actually a melody from the song Mountain Greenery from the 1925
show The Garrick Gaieties by Rodgers and Hart.
Check out the different iterations, starting from the original upbeat dance version
to sweeping romantic,
to a waltz
to wide-open Copland like...
to a clunky cowboy dance
to a New Orleans Dixieland
to a Tango
and finally a ballet sequence you'd find straight out of Tchaikovsky.
I love this cute dance, it isn't symmetrical or have clean even bars of 2, 4, or 8.
The melody is the same, except the second note is altered to avoid having three repeated
consecutive notes.
And Rittman continues to use the first four notes as a motif as well as the leap of a
fourth motif.
This is a prime example of taking an idea and exploring it.
All the dances in the show are very well done and in my opinion, the best of any of the
Rodgers and Hammersteins.
I'd like to know what your guy's favorite dance breaks, dance numbers, or dance sequences
from any musicals are.
Let me know in the comments.
Anyways, Richard Rogers wrote the song in the second act 'The Gentleman is a Dope'.
We don't start off with chords or anything harmonically elaborate, we just have 4 descending
notes.When the voice comes in, it imitates the motion, but the descent is drawn-out.
But the voice comes back up.
The song seems to be a battle between up and down.
The music is pulling her down; she seems to be unsure of which direction to take.
And it is important to note what the song is about.
She is quite pissed off at the moment and trying to make a choice, weighing her two options.
Sometimes the music starts pulling her down
sometimes she pulls herself down and up simultaneously.
Or the refrain, which still continues the same descending passage.
The song is in a constant battle between two directions, but finally the song ends with
an ascent.
Finally, I want to look at the following song and the title song.
We get halfway into the introduction, and we get this wonky barrage of tritones, which
indicates discord on this fast Allegro life Joe is currently feeling.
This leads straight into the chorus.
Although it sounds robust and typical, something is slightly amiss.
There is still a discord of the tritone in the bass.
We'd normally expect to hear this, But instead we get this.
And then we have more tritone interjections.
Then we get into the dance.
And in the dance, we get a tidal wave of past motifs and melodies, inundating Joe and the
audience with rumbustious music.
We go into the Yatata song we had earlier, while exploring the third, till we get a stack
of them, which of course is just two sets of woven tritones.
Then we get the fanfare from Joe's childhood.
And then an interjection of Jenny's 'Money isn't Everything' dance from the top of Act 2.
We continue to get a mashup of previous motifs from Joe's life, like "The Gentleman is a
Dope" from the last song, while still continuing tritones.
And then even something that sounds like a broken-record, as if Joe's city life is doomed
to be a tedious cycle again and again.
And we continue to hammer out Yatata and tritones till the end.
This has got to be my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein dance number.
It is fun to listen to, it is musically well explored, it carries the plot, and it is very
much integrated.
Stephen Sondheim at the age of 17 was a gofer, an assistant, for the show, and it made a
huge impact on him.
He even told Hammerstein "some people are going to have a hard time identifying with
this problem".
The problem being the one that Joseph Taylor Jr.
Is facing.
Legendary theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh once told Sondheim, "you know Steve, you spent
your entire life trying to fix the second act of Allegro".
And the more I look at Sondheim's work, the more I realize this statement's accuracy.
A lot of great info about this topic can be found in Mordden's new book: On Sondheim:
An Opinionated Guide.
Ethan Mordden says; a concept musical doesn't simply tell the story, it dissects it.
You get two shows in one, what is happening and what it means.
The whole concept of concept musicals warrants a whole 'nother discussion in itself.
Although there were production flaws and arguably some plot flaws; it is still an amazing work
and truly the black sheep in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon.
Two words that critics and scholars throw around a lot when talking about Allegro is
"fluid" and "integration".
Everything meticulously flowed from one thing to another, the action, the story, the set
pieces, the music, and the dances.
Agnes de Mille who directed, choreographed it, help set the music and even help pen the
story, designed a show like a puzzle, in which many pieces supported the other pieces to
create an effective story by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
However flawed it may be.
Thank you for watching.