Richard Rodgers

Richard Rodgers, the musical half of the two most successful words-and-music collaborations in Broadway history, was appropriately a child of New York City, born there not long after the start of the 20th century. He spent the 1920s and 1930s composing music for the lyrics of Lorenz Hart. The musicals they wrote together included Dearest Enemy (1925), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937) and Pal Joey (1940). Pal Joey is perhaps the best-remembered of these today. It was turned into a movie in 1957, starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak. Sings included “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Bewitched,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” and “There’s a Small Hotel.” After personal differences drove Rodgers and Hart apart, Rodgers teamed up instead with Oscar Hammerstein, and worked with him on another string of hits, redefining Broadway, until Hammerstein’s death in 1960. Rodgers died in late 1979. The obituary in The New York Times said that his name had come to represent “the evolution of American musical comedy into an art form of stature.”