Book Review

Richard Rodgers. By Geoffrey Block. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-300-09747-6 (cloth). Pp. xiii, 315. $35.00

Geoffrey Block’s Richard Rodgers is the inaugural volume of Yale Broadway Masters, a series dedicated to providing critical scholarship on musical theater to a broad audience. This book is an important addition to the extensive but primarily biographical literature on Rodgers (two biographies have appeared in the past five years alone). Block brings musical analysis, archival research, and reception history to the study of Richard Rodgers. He synthesizes copious primary source materials into sharply focused discussions on musicals from the three major phases of Rodgers’s career and provides a long overdue reassessment of some of Rodgers’s less familiar works. Following a brief introduction that illuminates Rodgers’s life-long devotion to musical theater, Block examines the composer’s earliest efforts in order to illustrate his innate talent for writing in the idiom. The next four chapters consist of in-depth studies of specific musicals, two each from Rodgers’s collaboration with Hart and from his collaboration with Hammerstein. The final chapter covers the period after Hammerstein’s death.