Me and Juliet is a musical comedy by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The work tells a story of romance backstage at a long-running musical. Me and Juliet premiered in 1953 and was considered a modest success. It ran for much of a year on Broadway and had a limited run in Chicago.
About Me and Juliet in brief
Me and Juliet is a musical comedy by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The work tells a story of romance backstage at a long-running musical. Me and Juliet premiered in 1953 and was considered a modest success. It ran for much of a year on Broadway and had a limited run in Chicago. The play required complex machinery, designed by Jo Mielziner, so that the audience could view action not only on the stage of the theatre where the show-within-the-show takes place, but in the wings and on the light bridge as well. The show closed once it had exhausted its advance sales, and the show has seldom been seen. A small-scale production was presented by London’s Finborough Theatre in 2010. The musical Oklahoma! opened in 1943; it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first work together and a massive hit. Soon afterlahoma! opened, Rodgers began considering the idea of a musical set backstage at a theatre staging a musical. The production could explore different areas of the backstage world. Rodgers also saw it as the opportunity to write a pure musical comedy, without the serious themes which had marked their early works—such as the attacks on racism in South Pacific, and a cultural tolerance in The King and I. The pair hired one of the top musical comedy directors, George Abbott, who accepted the position without reading the script. As soon as he read the script, he regretted the decision as he found it sentimental and melodramatic. With the show’s success, the pair hired another musical comedy director, George Gershwin, to direct A Chorus Line.
In August 1952, Hammerstein began a sketch of the plot of the show; he had a near-complete draft of the first draft by October 1952. In November 1952, he told Rodgers to make whatever changes in the script he thought in the best response to the pair’s response to his concerns. In January 1953, the show opened on Broadway; it ran for a year and a half, and returned a small profit to its backers. It was Rodgers’ sixth stage collaboration with Hammerstein; the pair had previously worked together on Allegro, the 1947 musical Allegro and The Sound of Music. Rodgers suggested the show start with the stage entirely bare, as if the audience had come in not at performance time but at another time during the day. Hammerstein was initially unenthusiastic, thinking the subject matter trivial, but Rodgers pressed the matter. Rodgers had agreed to the project that became the 1947 Musical Allegro under pressure from Hammerstein, who had long dreamed of doing a serious musical about an ordinary man. According to Stephen Sondheim, a protégé of Hammerstein,. Rodgers was able to keep the partnership together by taking Dick’s suggestion, which he did not want to take. The show’s star, Bill Hayes, states in his autobiography Like Sands Through the Hourglass : Bill Hayes,. Production costs were paid off and substantial profits went into the R&H till. So, though not in the same category as the storied five that were made into films – Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific,. The King & I and The sound of Music – our show must be considered a success.
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This page is based on the article Me and Juliet published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
