Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) was the most important figure behind the creation of one of the twentieth century’s great art forms, the Broadway musical.
When he began his career in the early 1920s, musicals were usually either featherweight comedies with improbable plots or operettas set in far-off locales and featuring stories involving milkmaids and princes. It was not uncommon for a star to have a contractual right to do his or her vaudeville schtick, such as playing the ukelele, at a particular time in the evening—a bit of business that would just have to be shoehorned into the plot.
But by the time of Hammerstein’s death forty years later, the Broadway musical was in the midst of its golden age, with such masterpieces as Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, and West Side Story opening nearly every year.
At the beginning of his career Hammerstein wrote conventional musical comedies and operettas. His first big hit, Wildflower (1923), about an irascible woman who had to keep her temper under control for six months or lose an inheritance, ran over a year. Rose-Marie (1924), which ran even longer, was an operetta set in the Canadian Rockies.
Hammerstein later recalled that he had at first planned to write musicals until he had enough money and would then write straight plays to say what he thought important. But as he wrote more musicals, he began to tinker with the form, making