Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The quintessential Broadway songwriting team. Perhaps the greatest of them all.
Yet outside of a quartet of shows - "Pal Joey," "The Boys from Syracuse," "Babes in Arms" and "On Your Toes" - their musicals are rarely heard, much less seen.That could change thanks to "Rodgers and Hart Rediscovered," a unique semi-staged concert series born this season out of the determined detective work of Albert Harris.
Harris, a one-time actor turned artistic director, runs Theater Off Park, a small off-Broadway house where audiences will hear five obscure Rodgers and Hart scores, "I Married an Angel," performed in October; "America's Sweetheart," Dec. 10-11; "Too Many Girls," Feb. 11-12; "Higher and Higher," April 14-15, and "Peggy-Ann," June 9-10.
" `Rodgers and Hart Rediscovered' is literally what it says it is," Harris explains, sitting in his tiny Greenwich Village theater office. "These are musicals that have not been seen, heard or even recorded since their original productions, in most cases more than 50 years ago."
Harris discovered most of the team's musicals were missing or lost. Not only were the scripts of the books gone, but so were many of the songs and almost all of the shows' orchestrations.
Yet, Harris was told by Bruce Pomahac, director of music for the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, that much of the material existed, if someone had the patience, desire and determination to go out and find it.
Harris did research at the Library of Congress in Washington and the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts in New York and then got permission from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to examine its archives located in a warehouse on West 28th Street in New York.
"There are thousands of square feet of cabinets that go to the ceiling and are filled with boxes, many of them unmarked," says Harris of the archives at R&H, which also licenses the shows that Rodgers and Hart wrote. "Everything that these men accumulated over the years got dumped there."
Harris spent nearly a year at the warehouse - "Crawling around on my hands and knees," he says - opening boxes and trying to determine what was there.
He then brought aboard musicologist James Stenborg, and the two men searched for another six months.
"All of the shows we found were not in any condition to be performed," Harris says. "There never were piano conductor scores - which are what people commonly use today. They didn't make them in those days."
What Harris and Stenborg discovered were carbon copies of the music, some of it in bits and pieces. Eventually, they gathered together all the material for each of the five shows.
"Jim put all this material into a computer," Harris explains. "He took all of the orchestra parts and created a piano vocal score."
Eventually, there may be new recordings of these shows since not only did the two men find all the missing songs and missing lyrics, but they found all the original orchestrations.
Much of it is virtually unknown.
Take the case of "America's Sweetheart," a 1931 musical that starred Jack Whiting and Harriet Lake, an ingenue who later changed her name to Ann Southern.
The show was a spoof of the early days of moviemaking in Hollywood and the only thing most people knew from it was one song, "I've Got Five Dollars."
"Of the five shows I wanted to do, it was the most elusive," says Harris. "Outside of a handful of published songs, the rest of the score had been lost since the original production. So no one has been able to do `America's Sweetheart' since 1931."
"You can imagine the rejoicing when those boxes were located," Harris says.