This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] David Armstrong: It's a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought. That if you become a teacher, by your pupils, you'll be taught. As a teacher, you'll forgive me if I boast. And I've now become an expert on the subject I most.

[0:33] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the extraordinary story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode Children Will Listen: The Harbach to Miranda Lineage Part 2. In our last episode, my colleague Albert Evans and I traced the direct line of Broadway genius and craftsmanship handed down from Otto Harbach to Oscar Hammerstein. Today we pick up the story on that fateful afternoon when Hammerstein began to pass on that knowledge to young Stephen Sondheim.

[1:10] David Armstrong: During his sophomore year at the George School, Sondheim had written his first musical, a satire of prep school life called By George. And in his own words, Sondheim thought the show was pretty terrific and had visions of being the first 15-year-old to have a show on Broadway. So he asked Hammerstein to read it as if it were just a musical that had crossed his desk as a producer. The next day, the famous librettist lyricist who had written Showboat and Oklahoma analyzed every aspect of By George from the first stage direction to the finale.

[1:43] David Armstrong: From afternoon to dusk, he turned pages, as Sondheim remembered it, showing me how to structure songs, how to build them with a beginning and a development and an ending, how to introduce character, what related a song to a character. Four hours of the most packed information. I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, that I learned more that afternoon than most people learn about songwriting in a lifetime. It was, of course, an extraordinary stroke of luck for him, both personally and professionally. A young man growing up in love with Broadway musicals was being foster fathered and now tutored by the theater's most significant book and lyric writer.

[2:24] David Armstrong: Starting that day, Hammerstein outlined for Sondheim a future course of study. The first assignment was to write an entire show, book, music, and lyrics, that was based on a good play, then write a musical adapted from a flawed play. The third assignment was to base a show on a work not written for the stage, such as a short story or novel. Finally, he was to write an entirely original musical. Over the following years, Sondheim would tackle each of these assignments, and each would be critiqued and guided by Hammerstein.

[2:54] David Armstrong: Meanwhile, Hammerstein and Rogers had to figure out what their next show would be after the unprecedented success of Oklahoma. As Rogers put it, whatever we write next, whatever anybody writes next, will be compared to Oklahoma and probably unfavorably. The movie producer Sam Goldwyn called Dick Rogers with some unsolicited advice. You know what you should do next, he said? What? asked Rogers. Shoot yourself.

[3:21] David Armstrong: Eventually, they determined that their second collaboration would be Carousel, based on a dark, bittersweet play called Liliom that blended realism and fantasy. Once again, their commitment to stay true to the story and the world of the play led them to new heights and to great innovation. Carousel would significantly increase the level of seamless integration of book, music, and lyrics, and choreography beyond what the team had achieved in Oklahoma, especially in a sequence near the beginning of the show that has come to be known as the bench scene.

[3:54] David Armstrong: Stephen Sondheim would later call the bench scene the singular most important moment in the evolution of contemporary musicals. Say, tell me something. Ain't you scared of me? I mean, after what that cop said about me taking money from girls. Something. Julie Jordan. You're a queer one, Julie Jordan. Ain't you sorry that you didn't run away? You can still go if you wanna. I reckon that I care to choose to stay. You couldn't take my money if I didn't have any, and I don't have a penny. That's true. And if I did have money, you couldn't take any, cause you'd ask and I'd give it to you. You're a queer one, Julie Jordan. Have you ever had a fella you give money to? No. Ain't you ever had a fella at all? No. Well, you must have had a fella you went walking with. Yes. Where'd you walk? Nowhere special requires.

[5:20] David Armstrong: The bench scene is what Hammerstein had been working towards since Showboat, and it is the direction that every writer after would follow. The genesis of Sondheim and Lin-Manwell Miranda's extended musical sequences clearly lay in Oscar Hammerstein's bench scene from Carousel. We can see the influence of the bench scene over and over throughout the history of musical theater ever since Carousel, and Carousel's soul-searching song soliloquy clearly influenced Rose's turn in Gypsy, Sweeney Todd's Epiphany, and several songs in Hamilton.

[5:54] David Armstrong: And in addition to Sondheim's priceless apprenticeship with Hammerstein, he would soon have the rare opportunity to witness the production of a Broadway musical firsthand. In the summer of 1947, following his freshman year at Williams College in Massachusetts, Sondheim got a job as a gopher on Rogers and Hammerstein's third musical, Allegro, an unconventional musical somewhat like the play Our Town. The 17-year-old typed scripts, ran for coffee, hung around rehearsals, and even traveled to New Haven for the show's first tryout before he had to go back to school.

[6:33] David Armstrong: Even though it would end up having a very respectable run, Allegro was not a success. However, it did introduce many new innovative and even experimental concepts to the musical theater. Among them was Hammerstein's transformation of the singing and dancing chorus into a formal Greek chorus that would comment on the action of the play and voice the inner thoughts of the main characters. This technique would be borrowed and employed by Sondheim throughout his career, especially in A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd.

[7:06] David Armstrong: This and other innovations that Allegro introduced had a profound effect on Sondheim. He said, right away, I accepted the idea of telling stories in space, of skipping through time and using gimmicks like the Greek chorus, all the stuff that's in Allegro. He would later say that he has spent most of his career trying to fix Allegro, trying to take the ideas that Oscar Hammerstein had introduced in that show and have them finally work and affect an audience in a way his mentor had intended.

[7:44] David Armstrong: During the summer, between sophomore and junior years, Sondheim completed the first of Oscar's assignments. It was called All That Glitters, a musical adaptation of the George S. Kaufman comedy. It was produced at his college, but Hammerstein couldn't attend because South Pacific was in rehearsal. In 1949, Hammerstein again put issues of race front and center with the musical South Pacific. And at the climax, our heroine Nellie Forbush must face up to her own internalized prejudice in order to bring the plot to its enchanting conclusion.

[8:38] David Armstrong: This is a show in which virtually every song in the score became a hit. Some Enchanted Evening, Nothing Like a Dame, I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair, Bali Ha'i, and many more. But at the center of the show is a song that many people pressured Rogers and Hammerstein to cut. A song called You've Got to Be Taught. 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. You've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade. You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late. Before you are six or seven or eight to hate all the people your relatives hate. You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be carefully taught.

[9:51] David Armstrong: South Pacific was the Hamilton of its day. Tickets were being scalped for $200. And this is when the top price for tickets was eight dollars. There's a famous, but perhaps apocryphal story attached to the demand for ticket sales for South Pacific. As the story goes, there was a sold-out performance, and a woman was sitting in a prime seat with an empty seat next to her. The woman behind her leaned forward and said, Oh, I'm so surprised to see an empty seat at South Pacific. It's so hard to get a ticket. And the woman responded, Well, yes, I know. It was supposed to be for my husband, but unfortunately he died. And so the woman behind you said, Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. Couldn't you get another friend to come with you? And she said, No, everyone's at the funeral. That story may or may not be true, but it certainly gives you an idea of the magnitude of a hit that South Pacific was, and people assumed that story was true.

[10:47] David Armstrong: Sondheim plunged into the second assignment, adapting a flawed play. And the one he chose was Maxwell Anderson's High Tour. He said it taught me something about playwriting, about structure, about how to take out the fat and how to make points. Sondheim's choice for Hammerstein's third assignment, musicalizing a novel or story, was Mary Poppins. He said it was very difficult to structure a play out of a group of short stories, and I wasn't able to accomplish it. By the time he finished the show, he was being graduated Magna Cum Laude with the class of 1950. He took the Hutchinson Prize, the school's highest honor in music.

[11:35] David Armstrong: During the summer of 1952, at a dinner party, Oscar introduced him to George Oppenheimer, a screenwriter and playwright who was looking for an assistant to help write a television series. Hammerstein said, Steve needs a job. Why don't you show him some of your stuff, Steve? He got the job, and within weeks he moved to Los Angeles. He had never written a professional script and considered himself a composer first, a lyricist by knack, and a librettist only by necessity. Yet his first professional work was as a writer of television scripts for a series based on the Topper movies.

[12:11] David Armstrong: Soon after, Rogers and Hammerstein began work on what would become The King and I, based officially on Margaret Landon's 1943 novel Anna and the King of Siam, but actually based on the 1946 film of the same name. Both were inspired by the memoirs of a British widow named Anna Leonowens, in which she presented a somewhat exaggerated tale of the years she spent as tutor to the King of Siam's children during the 1860s. Again, the show tackled big issues and themes: colonialism, slavery, the conflicts between traditional cultures and the forces of modernity.

[12:49] David Armstrong: While in California, Sondheim finished his final assignment, an original musical called Climb High, and mailed it to Hammerstein, believing it had commercial possibilities. At that point, Sondheim later admitted, I was still imitating Oscar in terms of emotion. At that age, I didn't have a lot of insight into lives that weren't like mine. Hammerstein pointed out Sondheim's poetic Hammerstein-style lyrics. He said, That's not what you feel, Steve. Don't write what I feel, write what you feel. Sondheim would later say, Oh, it had never occurred to me to write what I felt, and Oscar was the one who taught everyone to do that.

[13:33] David Armstrong: Sondheim returned to New York and eager to make a name for himself in the musical theater, he played his scores for anyone who would listen. And even as an adult, Hammerstein continued to help and advise Sondheim. Sondheim's first big break was being hired to write the music and lyrics for an adaptation of a play by Philip and Jules J. Epstein, the authors of the movie Casablanca. The musical was to be called Saturday Night, but the producer died before the show could go into production, and the musical would not be produced until 30 years later.

[14:08] David Armstrong: Next, he was asked to write lyrics only for a new musical with a book by Arthur Laurents and music by Leonard Bernstein. He told Hammerstein, I really don't want to do this, and he meant it. His impulses, his training, his ambitions, and most important of all, his sense of identity were tied up with being a composer. But Hammerstein convinced him that the show would offer him the chance to get started on Broadway and most importantly to work with top professionals. So Sondheim accepted the job, and of course the show turned out to be West Side Story. A boy like that wants one thing only, and when he's done, he'll leave you lonely.

[14:50] ♪ Musical number: "Something's Coming" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[16:00] David Armstrong: Sondheim was still showing his lyrics to his mentor, but the relationship was changing. He later said, "I started to become argumentative when we discussed the songs that I was writing." West Side Story changed Oscar's attitude toward me. It was like seeing a bird fly for the first time, and he was no longer protective. Hammerstein also encouraged Sondheim to sign on when a second job as a lyricist was offered. The show was to star Ethel Merman, and Hammerstein advised Sondheim that it would be invaluable experience to work on a show tailored specifically for a star performer and personality. The show became Gypsy, a show that many considered to be one of the best and most perfectly crafted musicals of all time, as well as being the pinnacle of the Rogers and Hammerstein style of traditional book musical.

During this time, Rogers and Hammerstein would create two more hit musicals, Flower Drum Song and The Sound of Music, a show that interestingly, Rogers and Hammerstein had tailored specifically for Merman's only rival for Broadway stardom, Mary Martin. Oscar Hammerstein died in 1960 at the age of 65. If he had lived only two years longer, he would have been able to see Sondheim achieve his dream of writing for the first time both lyrics and music for a Broadway musical. The show was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

[17:21] ♪ Musical number: "Comedy Tonight" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[18:03] David Armstrong: In his introduction to a biography of Hammerstein, Sondheim summed up his mentor with these words: "He was a giant. He changed the texture of the American musical theater forever. There may be librettists and lyricists whose work is more admired, but there are none greater." Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion have inspired and influenced the current generation of writers, just as Hammerstein inspired and influenced Sondheim's generation.

[19:31] ♪ Musical number: "In the Heights" — performed by Unknown performer ♪

[19:57] David Armstrong: Lin-Manwell Miranda was born in New York City and raised in the neighborhood of Inwood on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the neighborhood where his musical In the Heights would be set. His mother is a clinical psychologist and his father a consultant for the Democratic Party. During childhood and his teens, he spent at least one month each year with his grandparents in Puerto Rico. Although he only saw three musicals on Broadway during his childhood, musicals that he calls the Holy Trinity—Les Mis, Cats, and Phantom—a slew of movie musicals were in regular rotation in his house throughout his childhood, and they played a formative role in his development as a composer, lyricist, and performer. He has said, "My mom loved Shirley Temple movies, and my dad loved The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and Anything with Debbie Reynolds."

His love for musicals deepened when he was cast in the role of Bernardo in his sixth-grade class's production of West Side Story. "My mother rented the movie so we could watch it together," he said in an interview. "When the song America started, and it was about whether to live in Puerto Rico or live in the U.S., as a kid who grew up here and was sent there every summer, I was like, holy shit, West Side Story's about Puerto Ricans." Later in his senior year of high school, he directed a production himself. This would not be his last connection to West Side Story. In 2009, he was asked by Sondheim to work on a Broadway revival of the show and to create Spanish lyrics for some of the songs. And more recently, he adapted the song Maria into a dancy, star-studded pop track called Almost Like Praying, as part of his efforts to raise funds for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. He attended Wesleyan University studying theater and film. He wrote the earliest draft of In the Heights during his sophomore year of college in 1999, and it was produced there the following year. After several years of development and productions, the show opened on Broadway in 2008, receiving four Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Score.

[22:02] David Armstrong: Me and my cousin Rondy, just another dime a dozen mom and pop, stop and shop.

[22:07] David Armstrong: Oh my god, it's gotten dude on hot bite, my man Cole Porter said.

[22:11] David Armstrong: People come through but review cold water's in the lottery ticket just to bottle the routine.

[22:17] David Armstrong: Everybody's got a job, everybody's gonna dream.

[22:20] David Armstrong: They got some bizarre sit my coffee, you smell the first people hop to work, gossip.

[22:25] David Armstrong: After In the Heights, he worked on several stage and TV projects, including writing Academy Award-nominated songs for the Disney film Moana. And meanwhile, he was working on Hamilton. He spent seven years writing it, often sending sections to Sondheim for his insight and feedback. Here's what Lin-Manwell Miranda has to say about Sondheim and Rogers and Hammerstein: "It's hard to over-emphasize Sondheim's influence on the American musical theater. As a young man, he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II of Rogers and Hammerstein, the songwriting duo who revolutionized musicals. Rogers and Hammerstein wrote fully integrated songs that advanced the plot and revealed hidden depths in their characters."

[23:10] David Armstrong: In their hands, musical theater matured into a storytelling art form.

[23:15] David Armstrong: Sondheim built on Hammerstein's innovations by experimenting relentlessly with subject matter and form.

[23:22] David Armstrong: From his early lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy to more than 50 years' worth of scores that have pushed the boundaries and subject matter of musical theater in every conceivable direction.

[23:33] David Armstrong: He is musical theater's greatest lyricist, full stop.

[23:36] David Armstrong: The days of competition with other musical theater songwriters are done.

[23:40] David Armstrong: We now talk about his work the way we talk about Shakespeare or Dickens or Picasso, a master of his form, both invisible within his work and everywhere at once.

[23:51] David Armstrong: Sondheim was one of the first people I told about my idea for a piece about Alexander Hamilton back in 2008.

[23:57] David Armstrong: I'd been hired to write Spanish translations for a Broadway revival of West Side Story, and during our first meeting, he asked me what I was working on next.

[24:06] David Armstrong: I told him Alexander Hamilton, and he threw back his head in laughter and clapped his hands.

[24:11] David Armstrong: That is exactly what you should be doing.

[24:13] David Armstrong: No one will expect that from you.

[24:15] David Armstrong: How fantastic.

[24:17] David Armstrong: That moment alone, the joy of surprising Sondheim sustained me through many rough writing nights and missed deadlines.

[24:24] David Armstrong: I sent him early drafts of the songs over the seven year development of Hamilton, and his email response was always the same.

[24:31] David Armstrong: Variety, variety, variety, Lynn.

[24:34] David Armstrong: Don't let up for a second.

[24:35] David Armstrong: Surprise us.

[24:37] David Armstrong: Geniuses, lower your voices.

[24:39] David Armstrong: You keep out of trouble and you double your choices.

[24:42] David Armstrong: I'm with you, but the situation is fraught.

[24:44] David Armstrong: You've got to be carefully taught.

[24:46] David Armstrong: If you talk, you're gonna get it may surprise you to hear what Sondheim has to say about rap music.

[24:54] David Armstrong: He says, rap of all the forms of contemporary pop music is the closest to traditional musical theater.

[25:02] David Armstrong: Its roots are in vaudeville, both in its vamp-heavy rhythmic drive and in its verbal playfulness.

[25:09] David Armstrong: At first glance, it would seem an inappropriate medium for most shows, except for those dealing with the recording industry or stories which take place in milieus where rap might be the natural expression of the characters, as in the case of In the Heights.

[25:26] David Armstrong: But it need not be site specific.

[25:29] David Armstrong: Meredith Wilson's startling use of rap in the opening number of The Music Man demonstrated this.

[25:35] David Armstrong: What do you talk? What do you talk? What do you talk? He's a music man.

[25:36] David Armstrong: He's a what? He's a what? He's a music man, and he sells clarinets to the kids in the town with the big drum bones and the rat-at drums, big brass face, big brass face, and the piccolo, the piccolo unicorns, too, with a shiny gold braid on the coat, and a big red stripe running.

[25:52] David Armstrong: Well, I don't know much about bands, but I do know you can't make a living selling big drum bones.

[25:57] ⚠ About 4 minutes of audio could not be automatically transcribed.