Profile for Bruce Pomahac

Rodgers & Hammerstein made the decision to cast Helen Traubel as Fauna, Madame of the Bear Flag Cafe, in their 1955 musical, PIPE DREAM. After the success of Traubel's successful Las Vegas night club stint in early 1955 she came to R & H's new Steinbeck inspired musical ready to repeat the bawdy (and belty) style of singing that had made such an impression on R & H and her audiences in Vegas and on TV. But she quickly got cold feet. By the time the show opened in New York she had become so un...

Actually, it's not quite true that Rodgers had a "bunch" of tunes in his head which were forcefed to Hammerstein who had to "shoehorn" them into the script of ME AND JULIET. R & H never worked that way. Each song and scene was discussed at length before either of them went to work. By the time they did, each of them had a very good sense of what the particular challenge of each song was going to be and they both wrote to meet that particular challenge. It was Hammerstein who admired the music...