Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rogers Book

Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composersâ??more than nine hundred published songs, forty Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivableâ??Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood â??seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.

Now Meryle Secrestâ??biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernsteinâ??brings her extraordinary skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.

She writes of his childhood and how he learned at an early age to mask his feelings, escaping into the world of operettaâ??of Franz Lehar and Jerome Kern. She follows his close and wonderfully productive working relationship with Lorenz Hartâ??a collaboration that resulted in more than thirty Broadway and West End musicals, including Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, but was ultimately undone by Hartâ??s drinking. She evokes Rodgersâ??s triumphant second collaboration, with the giftedâ??and happily stableâ??Oscar Hammerstein, which gave us Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and more. She explores Rodgersâ??s own problems with alcohol as well as his periodic breakdowns; and she illuminates the deep-rooted tensions that underlay his forty-nine-year marriage to Dorothy Feiner.

Somewhere for Me is both a lively portrait of the American musical theatre and a revelation of the brilliant, passionate, moody, and mercurial artist who was one of its greatest figures.