“The theater-going public is so many intellectual cuts above the popular music-buying public that it’s criminal to hand them a series of metrical insults and call it a score. Songs should advance the plot.”
Lorenz Hart (1895–1943)
Hart was one of the towering figures of the American musical theater in the early twentieth century. His collaborations with composer Richard Rodgers (Columbia College 1919–21) produced dozens of classic songs such as “Manhattan,” “Blue Moon,” and “The Lady Is a Tramp” from shows such as Connecticut Yankee (1927), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), and By Jupiter (1942). Their success made Hart the first popular-song lyricist to receive equal billing with the composer. His nimble word play, sophisticated themes, and internal rhyme schemes, combined with Rodgers’s scores, propelled musical theater to a new level of elegance.