Once Upon Mary Rodgers
Her rollicking musical comedy ended a 30-year gap in women composers on Broadway. (Women’s History Month)
Maestra Music’s timeline of female Broadway composers shows an absence during the golden age of musicals. During a span of about 30 years (from 1931 to 1959), only two women composed musicals for Broadway. The first was Anna Russell in 1953, whose show Anna Russell’s Little Show only played 16 performances. The second female composer, 6 years later, found much greater success and longevity — Mary Rodgers.
Mary was born in 1931, right at the beginning of that 30-year drought. Her father, on the other hand, the famed and legendary composer Richard Rodgers, produced some his best and most well-known music during that same time period (23 musicals to be exact). So from a very young age Mary was surrounded by music. Mary and her sister Linda had regular piano lessons, and their father would often test them on their musical knowledge and ability, for example playing chords on the piano and asking the girls to identify them.
Growing up, the Rodgers family would often spend time with Oscar Hammerstein and his family. On one particular weekend Mary met their next-door neighbor for the first time…Stephen Sondheim. The next time they saw each other was at the opening night of Carousel in 1945. But it was a few years later when they were both apprentices at the Westport Country Playhouse that they became lifelong friends. Both played a vital role in each others lives and careers. In 1949, it was Rogers who introduced Sondheim to his future collaborator Hal Prince at the Broadway opening of South Pacific. And then in 1957 at the opening of West Side Story, Sondheim introduced her to Leonard Bernstein, who hired her to write and assist in his televised Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.
But just two years later, in 1959, she was making her own Broadway debut with Once Upon a Mattress, which played 244 performances and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical, which she lost to her father’s Sound of Music. The show was also the debut of little known comedic actress, Carol Burnett, who was nominated for Best Leading Actress. There was a Broadway revival in 1996 and three television presentations. The 2005 production for Disney/ABC TV featured this week’s podcast guest Georgia Stitt as production music coordinator.
In the creation of Once Upon a Mattress, Mary played some of the songs from the musical for her father, particularly “Yesterday I Loved You” to which he asked, “Why did you do that tempo change in the bridge? I wouldn’t have done that.“ Of that exchange Mary says, “I told myself I must never ask his opinion again, because I’ll never know who wrote the music and neither will anybody else.“
Rogers went on to write music for another Broadway show in 1963 called Hot Spot, for which Sondheim was brought in to create the opening and closing numbers. It only ran for 43 performances, though, and marked the final stage performance of Judy Holliday. Three years later Rodgers was back with a more popular Off-Broadway revue The Mad Show, which was a collection of skits adapted from Mad magazine. It ran for 871 performances, and The New York Times’ Stanley Kaufmann wrote, “It asks for our imaginative support and (for a change) stimulates and deserves it… it is always amusing.” Again, Rodgers and Sondheim came together to create a parody song called “The Boy From…” sung by Linda Lavin in the original cast recording and based on the jazz standard “The Girl from Ipanema.” Sondheim’s official songwriting credit went to the pseudonym Esteban Rio Nido, which translates from the German, via Spanish, to “Stephen River Nest.”
But throughout her many compositions and writings for the stage and television, including the lyrics for the theme song to Captain Kangaroo, she would never again match the success of Once Upon a Mattress. Though she did find great success writing children’s books, most notably Freaky Friday in 1972. It was turned into a motion picture starring Jodie Foster, a TV movie with Shelly Long, and later a remake starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. Rodgers even composed a musical adaptation of it for Theatreworks USA in 1991. But by then her focus wasn’t on composing anymore.
“I’m not as single-minded about composing music as my father was or my son is.“
From her time on the board of ASCAP to being the family representative at the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, Mary found joy and passion in other areas of the arts as well as in being a mother. She said that she felt like a gene conduit, and was happy to have passed on the family talent to her son, Adam Guettel, the Tony Award winning composer of The Light in the Piazza and Floyd Collins. She saw in Adam the carrying on of the family tradition.
In fact, Mary first suggested the 1960 novella The Light in the Piazza to her father, who decided against it. But then decades later she passed the idea on to her son. When asked why she didn’t adapt to work herself, she said “I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent. I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.“ For Rogers, she found certain obstacles to being a female songwriter because composing was not something girls were expected to do. “The country must be full of talented women composers. I know it. The trouble is they don’t know it.”
And so for many years she helped a new generation of artists know their talent. As the chair of Juilliard from 1994 to 2001, she was involved in many aspects of the school and considered the students to be her kids. When she passed away in 2014, the president of Juilliard, Joseph Polisi, praised his longtime friend and colleague:
Mary was an amazingly vibrant and unique human being. That’s why it’s difficult for me and so many friends and family members to come to grips with her passing. She was truly a life force whose presence illuminated any room she entered…In fact, it was that unconditional love that made us all feel that we were special people in her world — a world that nurtured the performing arts, loved the hustle and bustle of the theater, and supported and embraced the many young artists in dance, drama, and music who knew Mary during her time at the School. What a joyous legacy she has left for us all.
Thanks to The New Yorker, Deseret News, NewMusicBox USA, and New York Times for the information compiled to produce this article and segment on the podcast.
