IT SOUNDS like the plot for a musical. In 1923 Dorothy Blanchard, the daughter of a Williamstown ship’s captain, won a beauty pageant and sailed to America, dreaming of becoming a movie star.
She toured the US as understudy in a stage revue before marrying a New York businessman, to whom she had two children.
On a cruise she met budding stage lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who was unhappily married. They fell madly in love.
Both divorced and married in 1929. They had a son, James. Oscar went on to co-write, mostly with Richard Rodgers, famous musicals such as South Pacific and The Sound of Music.
Dorothy and Oscar lived happily ever after in Manhattan.
Now their grandson, Oscar Hammerstein III – known as Andy – is visiting Australia for the first time.
In Williamstown yesterday, he was keen to see the two-storey bluestone on The Strand, called Mandalay, where Dorothy and her four sisters had a comfortable upbringing as daughters of Henry James Blanchard, a Port Phillip ship pilot.
But Mandalay was not quite as comfortable as the six-storey New York townhouse full of servants in 63rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues, where Dorothy, who died in 1987, lived as a Hammerstein.
”She had quite a life. It’s an interesting odyssey and it certainly does have its twists and turns,” says Andy.
He used to run from his grandfather’s legacy, but is now proud of it. ”I figured the only way I could get out from under his shadow is shine my own light, within that shadow.”
Two years ago he wrote the biography The Hammersteins: A Musical Theatre Family and now travels the world as a kind of ambassador.
He will be the keynote speaker at today’s inaugural symposium of the University of Melbourne’s new Australian Centre for Music Theatre Research. The symposium’s theme is Rodgers and Hammerstein: Understanding the Phenomenon.
Local historian Frank van Straten will present a paper on the history of Australian R&H productions; local composer Peter Pinne will present one on a lesser-known – and unsuccessful – Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Allegro, about a doctor struggling to find himself.
VCA students will sing and author and librettist Peter Fitzpatrick will analyse Hammerstein lyrics such as ”the corn is high as a elephant’s eye” from Oklahoma.
Andy Hammerstein says ”a sense of decency” and solid plots are why his grandfather’s musicals have lasted.
”The story is the skeleton on which everything rests,” he said. In 1930s vaudeville, it was common to write songs and cast actors first, ”throw it all together and who cares about the plot”.
After the initial run ”it was never seen again”. Thus, ”there are many great songs in many awful shows that we will never hear again”.
The symposium is on from 9am today at Federation Hall at the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts campus in Grant Street, Southbank.
Tickets at the door are $60, half price per person for groups of more than six, or $25 for students.
– Carolyn Webb/The Age
