Before Rodgers and Hammerstein earned praise as the greatest musical theater duo of the 20th century, there was Rodgers and Hart.
Dick Rodgers composed, and Lorenz Hart wrote the lyrics to around a thousand songs, including "My Funny Valentine" and "Blue Moon" — which lends its name to Richard Linklater's new film about Hart.
Ethan Hawke, who has appeared in several Linklater films, stars as a man consumed by regret who spirals into bitter monologues on the opening night of Oklahoma! Rodgers teamed up for the first time with Oscar Hammerstein II — snubbing Hart — on that 1943 musical, which became a runaway success.
"It was this little howl into the night of an artist being left behind. It was sad and beautiful and witty and irreverent and what a character," Linklater told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel about the script he received in the 2010s from Robert Kaplow. "For over a decade, we just kind of kept working on it and eventually its time had come." Linklater has previously adapted Kaplow's coming-of-age novel Me and Orson Welles for a film that was released in 2008.
Blue Moon unfolds almost entirely inside of the Broadway staple Sardi's, where Hart — simply known as Larry in the film — drinks at the nearly empty bar and waxes lyrical about his work, artists he's met and an impending sense of doom. The scene is moody and unravels like a carefully scripted play where Hart appears to be both aware of his greatness and on the brink of collapse.
"You see breakup movies, but you don't see a lot of artistic breakup movies, which to me are much more fascinating," Linklater said, pointing to the affection Rodgers and Hart had for one another as dedicated professional partners.
The breakup over the latter's alcoholism and unreliability was thus all the more frustrating. In one scene, Rodgers says he had to write some of the lyrics to the musical By Jupiter (1942) himself as a result. Andrew Scott earned a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for his portrayal of Rodgers.
Hart died in November 1943, eight months after the premiere of Oklahoma! — which marked the beginning of what became the storied Rodgers and Hammerstein duo behind hits like The King and I, Carousel and The Sound of Music.
"Basically, we're watching a human being die of a heartbreak in 90 minutes," Hawke said.
Hawke is practically unrecognizable as Hart — short, balding with a combover, speaking in a raspy voice. Hawke credits the transformation to a "huge lift" on the part of Linklater and the crew who built the film around "this kind of person who's picked the theater with a monastic devotion and sees all of the world in it."
A complex relationship with women
Another central plot point revolves around Hart's infatuation with his 20-year-old protégée Elizabeth Weiland (played by a bleached blonde Margaret Qualley), a Yale student who doesn't love him back. Kaplow based parts of the script on correspondence he found between the two.
Hart, who was gay but not openly so, lived at a time when same-sex relationships were criminalized in the U.S. — and he was fluid in his sexuality, having even proposed to women.
"The thing he's really suffering from is this breakup with Richard Rodgers. But that hurts so much that he can't really look at it," Hawke said. "He's impaling himself on a different spike because that's one he can handle — unrequited love. I think there's desperation from him to prove that he is 'normal.' And if she would just love him back then, he would magically be normal."
As a gay, Jewish, alcoholic man in WWII-era New York, Hart faced many challenges, but perhaps the greatest was a rapidly changing art scene that he struggled to recognize at the end of his life.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Julie Depenbrock and edited by Olivia Hampton. The digital version was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.
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