The history of Broadway forked in the summer of 1942, with consequences nobody could have foreseen.
That January, a new musical called “Sunny River” had closed less than a month after opening. It was a painful rebuke for the librettist/lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, the latest in a string of flops and disappointments that had dragged on for 11 years. He had tried everything to change his fortunes: reuniting with old collaborators, enlisting new ones, moving to Hollywood, moving back. He was the same man who had brought a new seriousness to the musical theater with “Show Boat,” written with Jerome Kern in 1927. But that had been a long time ago. And he was about to turn 47.
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