Allegro is a 1947 Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, their third after their triumphs with Oklahoma! and Carousel and their first collaboration with an original story.
The first act begins in an unnamed small American town with the birth of the protagonist, Joseph Taylor Jr., the son of the town doctor, who plans for Joe to take over for him when he's gone. A series of scenes and musical numbers take us through Joe's childhood up to his graduation from high school. Joe becomes college buddies with another aspiring doctor, the lazy but likable Charlie, and despite the girls he meets at college, he still courts his childhood sweetheart, Jenny Brinker, a manipulative young woman who thinks Joe would be a failure if he became a small-town doctor like his father. Joe's mother, Marjorie, considers Jenny an unsuitable wife for Joe because of this, but she dies of a heart attack before she can express her reservations, and the act ends with Joe and Jenny's wedding.
In the second act, Joe and Jenny are struggling financially because of The Great Depression, and when Joe has an offer to leave his hometown and work at a big hospital in Chicago where Charlie works, Jenny persuades him to take it. After a time skip, Joe has become a well-paid city doctor who spends most of his time treating wealthy hypochondriacs and sucking up to influential donors, and begins to feel that he has failed to do the important work he was planning to do back home. This preoccupies Joe so much that he fails to notice that his secretary Emily has fallen in love with him, or that Jenny is having an affair.
Allegro was even more ambitious than the two revolutionary musicals that preceded it. In telling the story of a man's life and career, the creators used theatrical devices influenced by everything from Our Town to ancient drama. There were no realistic sets, with props and projections used instead, and there was a Greek Chorus that commented on the action or expressed characters' thoughts. Characters who died would come back onstage to observe the action unseen, and the design and lighting team came up with complicated effects like dissolving from a group of clumsy student dancers to the way they imagined themselves to be dancing.
The show received mixed reviews and was not a hit; it ran only 315 performances, toured only briefly, and had no international productions or movie adaptation. Hammerstein talked about revising it to deal with some of the problems critics had noted such as an excessively preachy second act, but his 1960 death put an end to that. However, it was admired as an attempt to expand the range of stories musicals could tell and the theatrical techniques they could use, inventing what would later become known as the "concept musical" built around a non-realistic staging concept, a format which later musicals like Cabaret and Chicago would successfully use.
Hammerstein's protégé Stephen Sondheim, who was with the production as a gofer, was highly influenced by its experimental style despite what he saw as its flawed execution. Producer Cameron Mackintosh once told Sondheim that he had spent his entire career trying to fix the second act of Allegro. "The more I think about the shows I've worked on," Sondheim wrote, "the more I suspect he was right."
This play contains examples of:
- Childhood Friend Romance: Deconstructed with Joe and Jenny; their marriage doesn't work in part because Joe doesn't really know the person she's become, just the girl he met when they were children.
- The City vs. the Country: The small-town variant, and played mostly straight; Joe's hometown is a seemingly wonderful place full of "men whose hands are strong," Chicago is a miserable world full of phonies, and the Eleven O'Clock Number, "Come Home," is about how much better life will be for Joe if he returns home. Subverted, however, in that the Manipulative Bitch Jenny is a hometown girl while the nurturing and caring Emily is a city girl.
- College Widow: Beulah always tags along when her sister goes to the campus to visit her boyfriend Charlie. Because she's single, there's more than one boy who would kill to go on a date with her.
- Dr. Feelgood: Implied of Charlie's uncle Dr. Bigby Denby, the head physician at the hospital where Charlie and Joe work:Society women: Doctor! Doctor! I need another shot!
The shots he gives are too divine!
He fills a little needle and he gives you all it's got!
Your fanny hurts, but you feel fine! - Dream Ballet: The above-mentioned college dance, where the realistically klutzy dancers are replaced by their own dream of how they want to look and move.
- The Ghost: Joe is not seen onstage until he arrives at college; before that, the Greek Chorus gives us his thoughts and characters address him while looking offstage or into the audience.
- Greek Chorus: Most of their lines are spoken in unison, though they also sing sometimes in addition to the physically-present singing chorus.
- Happily Married: Joe's parents seem to have an ideal marriage, as portrayed in their song "A Fellow Needs a Girl." Joe even comments that his middle-aged parents still act the way young lovers do.
- Manipulative Bitch: Downplayed with Jenny; she usually has legitimate reasons for what she wants, but she always resorts to manipulation to make Joe see things her way. While he's away at college she deliberately writes him letters about other boys she's dating to make him jealous and make sure he won't leave her for a college girl; in the second act, when she's trying to convince Joe to take the Chicago job, the Greek Chorus describes how she calculates everything she says or does to play on Joe's guilt.
- Melancholy Musical Number: The show's most popular song, "The Gentleman is a Dope," is Emily's uptempo lament about Joe wasting his potential and her Unrequited Love for her married boss.
- Minor Character, Major Song: "So Far," one of the most beautiful ballads in the score, is sung by a character named Beulah who Joe goes on a date with; he falls asleep while she's singing the song and she never appears again. Hammerstein admitted that he and Rodgers wanted to use the song but it wasn't appropriate for any of their main characters, so he created the character just to sing it.
- Single Stanza Song: "Poor Joe," an eight-bar chorus that recurs throughout the play.
- What Does She See in Him?: Stated by the couple's relatives in "A Lovely Day for a Wedding":Taylors: What can he see in her?
Brinkers: What can she see in him?
Taylors: The Brinkers all are stinkers!
Brinkers: And the Taylor crowd is grim!
