Daniel Okrent

Now, his first...

Music and lyrics show was the enormous success of Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962, I believe it was.

Recalling that experience of a show that was a gigantic hit, he wrote to a friend to say how it was the most bitter experience that he had ever had as a composer, as a writer, or as a theater person.

The critics took me out and they trounced me and dragged me through the mud and they beat the hell out of me.

And in fact, if you go back and read the reviews of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, there was one pan.

The critic for the World Telegram and Son, you know, really slashed it and demeaned it and said, you know, this would have been a lousy score in the 1930s.

But other than that, it got good reviews.

It got very positive respect for his music.

and this was the first time his music had been performed on Broadway.

But his memory of the experience just two years later was one of being horribly mistreated by critics.

Yeah, I think your instinct is right.

We remember Do I Hear a Waltz because that song became a very big hit and was sung by many, many other popular singers of the era and even since then.

It was also a very, this is not to demean Rogers at all, he was a great composer, but it was very much easy listening.

It was something, a kind of music that could be popular.

Yeah, let's play it.

I think he gave it a shot.

I think it wasn't that he made a valiant effort to do it.

But see, let's see if this is a possibility.

And he did not come out publicly, really, for the middles to late 70s.

Not that anybody was asking that much in those days.