The historical past of Broadway forked in the summertime of 1942, with penalties no person may have foreseen.
That January, a brand new musical known as “Sunny River” had closed lower than a month after opening. It was a painful rebuke for the librettist/lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, the most recent in a string of flops and disappointments that had dragged on for 11 years. He had tried every part to alter his fortunes: reuniting with previous collaborators, enlisting new ones, shifting to Hollywood, shifting again. He was the identical man who had introduced a brand new seriousness to the musical theater with “Present Boat,” written with Jerome Kern in 1927. However that had been a very long time in the past. And he was about to show 47.
