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Nearly a half century of conditioning left the opening night audience for the new Broadway musical "Oklahoma!" on Wednesday, March 31, 1943 excitedly expecting the curtain to rise on a lavishly costumed company arrayed in front of a big set ready to belt out a loud rip-roaring, foot-stomping opening number.

Nobody was quite prepared when instead the curtains at the St. James Theatre parted to reveal a pastoral scene of tall corn ripening under blue skies and a lone, handsome cowboy center stage gently singing the praises of a warm summer morning. The groundbreaking Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical "Oklahoma!" would go on to an unprecedented 2,212 performances, shattering all Broadway records.

Independently, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had already enjoyed long and celebrated careers before coming together for the first time to create this seminal musical comedy. Both had been attracted to the charming love story in the 1931 play "Green Grow the Lilacs" by Oklahoma-born playwright Lynn Riggs, which lasted on Broadway for a modest 64 performances. But when Hammerstein's great collaborator Jerome Kern, with whom he had written "Show Boat," and Richard Rodgers fabled lyricist, Lorenz Hart, both turned down their partner's suggestion to musicalize the Riggs play, the two men, learning of their mutual interest through the small community of Broadway songwriters, decided to give each other a try. Ultimately this most spectacular partnership in musical theater history would revolutionize and transform the genre forever.

What marks the great departure of "Oklahoma!" from all prior musicals is Oscar Hammerstein's insistence that musical numbers arise out of character and story, reflecting a moment in time so suffused with emotion that the sudden arrival of song seems as natural as a character's next breath. Heretofore, musical plots had been supple frameworks onto which brilliant songwriters like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter would hang a dozen or so of their most dazzling compositions like baubles on a Christmas tree. Frequently, the plot was awkwardly twisted around to accommodate a song just recently written, or a desired star would suddenly become available and new songs would simply replace old without a ripple of difference in the overall play. One of Porter's signature "list" songs like "You're the Top" could fit perfectly into any one of his 1930s productions.

Not so for Hammerstein who wove his lyrics into the drama with painstaking craftsmanship.

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