Hammerstein was probably the single most important figure in the development of the American musical. With Show Boat, which he wrote in 1927 with Jerome Kern, and which was the first work to combine the music of European operetta with a wholly American subject matter, life on the Mississippi, and with Oklahoma!, which he wrote with Richard Rodgers in 1943, wholesale New York Yankees HatsHammerstein conceived the musical as a 'sung play’, in which the songs, rather than simply providing musical interludes, diversion or comic relief, actually established and defined character and drove the narrative forward. It was Hammerstein, Sondheim says, 'who made it possible, even necessary, to take characters in a musical seriously.’
When Sondheim was 11, he and his mother moved to a farm in Pennsylvania. The lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II lived nearby, and Sondheim became friends with his son Jamie. Seeking refuge from his mother, he became a regular visitor to the Hammerstein home. discount New York Yankees Hats Sondheim had learnt to play the piano as a child, but Hammerstein became his mentor and inspiration – in Sondheim’s words 'a surrogate father’. He once said that if Hammerstein had been a geologist 'I would probably have been a geologist.’
When Sondheim was 10, his father left the family for another woman. His mother was a difficult woman – one contemporary would describe her as 'the most pretentious, self-centred, narcissistic woman I have known in my life’ – Cheap Boston Red Sox Hatsand she seems to have taken all the anger and frustration she felt over her husband’s desertion out on her son. Sondheim would later describe to his biographer Meryle Secrest how his mother would subject him to verbal abuse and in his teenage years sometimes behave in inappropriate and embarrassing ways, including sporting herself provocatively in front of him in low-cut blouses.
