Stage musicals should deal with difficult issues, just as classics like Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific did, Weinstein believes.
Rodgers and Hammerstein immediately announced plans to bring the show to Broadway.
In 1945, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Carousel" opened on Broadway.
When it comes to transformations, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the book.
He is similarly neglectful of the way in which such shows, when artfully blended, helped to produce the admirable works of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 1940s and 1950s.
Certainly, putting the orchestra on stage for a rock or jukebox musical is in keeping with the show's sensibility, which tends to be more Hammerstein Ballroom than Rodgers and Hammerstein.
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When it was first performed in 1957, it was instantly seen by 107 million TV viewers, an audience larger than that of all the previous Rodgers and Hammerstein collaborations put together.
"Like Rodgers and Hammerstein, I'm not afraid to deal with themes about the ups and downs of life, yet which are still entertaining, and you still feel these stories, " he says.
As a 90-minute TV special, "Cinderella" was roughly two-thirds as long as the usual Rodgers and Hammerstein show, and accordingly took them seven months to write instead of the usual nine or 10.
When my future wife and I met on a river boat on the Hudson in 1962, we sang our way through half the major musicals of the 40s and 50s, including almost the complete catalog of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific picked up four Outer Critics Circle awards - outstanding revival of a musical, outstanding director of a musical for Bartlett Sher, outstanding actor in a musical for Paulo Szot and outstanding featured actor in a musical for Danny Burstein.
Loos ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes") wrote "Happy Birthday" as a starring vehicle for her friend, Helen Hayes, and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein produced it on Broadway in 1946, where it ran for nearly a year and a half.
The original production of South Pacific - composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II - won nine Tonys in 1950.
Bartlett Sher, who oversaw the show, thanked Rodgers, and Hammerstein, along with original director Joshua Logan and James Michener, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, the collection of short stories which inspired the production.
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