The Classical World in Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys From Syracuse

Timothy J. Moore (University of Texas, Austin)

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s The Boys From Syracuse, first produced in 1938, is a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Unlike Shakespeare, however, who sets Comedy of Errors in a rather timeless Ephesus, lyricist Hart and George Abbott, the author of the play’s book, make much of the classical setting. The play begins with the line, “This is a drama of Ancient Greece,” and allusions to ancient Greece and Rome occur throughout the play. These allusions mock the pretensions of classical learning even as they give extra pleasure to those who have such learning. They also contribute to a theme that makes the play both faithful to its Plautine and Shakespearean predecessors and peculiarly timely in the late 1930's: the universality of human foibles and concerns. Rodgers’ melodies work hand in hand with the lyrics and book to reinforce these effects.

Hart's anachronisms participate in one of the favorite pastimes of 1930's musical comedy: fun at the expense of high culture. Several of Hart's allusions refer to the cultural panache of classical learning, most hilariously when a sex-starved wife laments of her husband:

I wear my nicest negligee
And find him reading Plato.

Even as they laughed at the pretensions of the knowledgeable, however, those who did knew the classics well could enjoy Hart's penchant for appealing to the cognoscenti. The last stanza of "Dear Old Syracuse, " for example, includes the rhyme:

When the thirst for love becomes a mania,
You can take the night boat to Albania!

To some, this would merely be a particularly audacious rhyme. Others would see here an allusion to the play's Plautine source, Menaechmi, set not in Shakespeare's Ephesus, but in Epidamnus, in modern-day Albania.

The humor of the play's anachronisms relies, of course, on the audience's awareness that the ancient and modern worlds are not the same. Yet these same anachronisms serve to reinforce the common humanity of all people, whether ancient, Shakespearean, or modern. The same disgruntled wife who objects to her husband reading Plato, for example, threatens:

I'll reside in Athens six weeks
While I get me a divorce.

Athens as Reno makes a great anachronistic joke; but it also reminds the audience that marital strife is hardly unique to their age. Rodgers' music reinforces this sense of commonality. Though he often worked hard—and successfully—to recreate an authentic "feel" to match the setting of his plays (Rodgers, 1975), here he made no effort to give any musical "feel" of antiquity. Furthermore, he wrote songs in which widely different styles of voices sang together.

In the emphasis on universality, Rodgers, Hart, and Abbott followed the lead of both Shakespeare, whose play underlines the absurdity of arbitrary distinctions like that between his Ephesus and his Syracuse; and Plautus, whose mixing of Greece and Rome suggested that Romans were not as different from Greeks as they might have liked to think (Moore, 1998). They also created a play particularly appropriate for 1938. While emphasis on differences between peoples was leading Europe to its bloodiest conflict ever, theater audiences across the Atlantic were reminded that common human traits and desires transcend even the widest of cultural gaps.

During the presentation I will play recordings of very short selections from the play's songs. I will therefore need a tape player or a digital projector with sound.