A Perfectly Tragic Pair Analysis

A Perfectly Tragic Pair
Richard Rogers (1902-1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1942) were an American songwriting team. While working together, they wrote more than twenty-eight stage musicals and more than 500 songs between 1919 and 1943. Their first song on Broadway was “Any Old Place with You,” sung in A Lonely Romeo (Hurwitz 100). They had individual songs appear in a variety of shows, but their first complete score and break through success was The Garrick Gaieties. This was originally scheduled as a two-performance fundraiser for the Theatre Guild, but was so successful that it was extended and ran for 211 performances. After this, the team of Rodgers and Hart quickly became household names. Hart was seven years older than Rodgers, who was

Hart at the time was a recent Columbia graduate. Rodgers describes that first meeting:
“The total man was hardly more than five feet tall. He wore frayed carpet slippers, a pair of tuxedo trousers, an undershirt and a nondescript jacket. His hair was unbrushed, and he obviously hadn’t had a shave for a couple of days. All he needed was a tin cup and some pencils. But that first look was misleading, for it missed the soft brown eyes, the straight nose, the good mouth, the even teeth and the strong chin. Feature for feature he had a handsome face, but it was set in a head that was a bit too large for his body and gave him a slightly gnome like appearance” (Hurwitz 98).
From there, the artistic team became a hit. Through Rodgers’s friend from summer camp, Herb Fields, they came to know the Fields family who picked up a very early Rodgers and Hart song called “Any Old Place with You” and added it in a current show of his. The show only ran for six weeks, but at the ages of 23 and 17, they were on

It ran for 6 months, and “Manhattan” was a hit. From 1920 to 1930, the team wrote musical comedies for Broadway and London’s West End. In these years, they were writing about four new shows a year. These shows included Dearest Enemy, Betsy, Peggy-Ann, The Girl Friend, Chee-Chee, and A Connecticut Yankee