Dear Rodgers and Hammerstein

I’m writing to thank you for The King and I, which I attended a few hours ago at the Lincoln Center in New York City.  The performance was outstanding, with terrific acting, great directing, and a wonderful orchestra.  Of course, all of this was in performance of your beautiful words and music.

I first saw The King and I sixty-odd years ago when I was a teenager.  My father treated my mom, my little brother, and me to balcony seats. I was transfixed, just as I was tonight, not only by your songs, but also by your characters and story. Your musical was even more moving than I recalled.

Just as each of us is trapped when we reach a certain age, the king himself is ensnared between his inescapable life experience on the one hand, and his early dreams, challenged by the demands of a real and continually changing world, on the other, a world which seems very different when viewed through the lens of enough experience.

For example, when I was young the two-way radio watch was a fiction, born of a dream, on the wrist of Dick Tracy, a cartoon detective.  Now that fantasy is real, a two-way wrist cellphone which also displays your heart rate.

Every love story is personal and, for that reason, intensely private, as it exists solely between two human beings.  Anna, a teacher, and the King certainly loved each other, but faced inescapable difficulty, separated, as they were, by position, culture, and gender.  Of course after the final curtain, when the entire audience rose in a standing ovation for the orchestra and cast, I felt I had been an eyewitness—a participant, if you will—, to, or in, an unlikely love story with twists, turns, and ultimately, a poignant realization at the King’s death and Anna’s departure.  Like the two of them, I have found love in my life, but mine, as theirs, has been far-removed from the fairy tale ending of “happily ever after.”

Back in my hotel room I’m thinking that our dreams naturally pull us toward love, toward fulfilment, while our own limitations and a constantly encroaching world are barriers that none of us can fully overcome.  In your words tonight, “No man is as good a king as he can be.”

I know you never heard of personal computers, the internet, or Wikipedia, which contains an entry about you that says, “Their musical theatre writing partnership has been called the greatest of the 20th century.”  But I will tell you from my own experience that your musical Sound of Music is one of the best-loved movies of all time, and each summer plays to a packed house of more than fifteen thousand people at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.  I wish you could see the thousands of pinpoints of light from cellphones waving in unison, as we sing along with your song Edelweiss, performed larger than life on the big screen.

I hope you were happy . . . no, elated at the success of your work.  Had I created even one of your musicals, notably including The King and I, I would be entirely satisfied . . . no, thrilled . . . with my career.

I would continue, but it’s past midnight and I have an early morning appointment to do something not nearly as important, or fulfilling, as seeing and hearing your masterpiece this evening.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, you did good.

Thank you.  And love,

Alan