The composer (Once Upon a Mattress) and children's book author (Freaky Friday) Mary Rodgers (1931-2014) had this to say of her decision to work on a syrupy television musical in the early 1960s: "In my defense, that was during the period when I would basically do anything. And that period has been my whole life." Her whole life is on dazzling display in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, in which her more dispiriting undertakings are just as enthusiastically recollected as her sporadic but stratospheric triumphs.
The daughter of musical theater titan Richard Rodgers and decorator and inventor Dorothy, Mary Rodgers turns her clashes with her human-briar-patch-like mother into a sort of percussion that rumbles beneath Shy's more melodic memories. Rodgers relives her personal highs and lows and her artistic hits, misses and close calls, as when her father had her standing by to finish the lyrics for The Sound of Music in case the then-ailing Oscar Hammerstein didn't pull through. (He did.)
Shy is a treasure chest of goodies for fans of the New York performing arts world at mid-century and just beyond. The narrative is piled high and wide with stories about the likes of Leonard Bernstein, for whom Rodgers worked on CBS's Young People's Concerts, and Stephen Sondheim, with whom she collaborated and for whom she pined. Readers besotted with Old Broadway would probably inhale Rodgers's memoir no matter its quality, but Sky has the added bonus of being note-perfect. About having formidable parents, Rodgers writes, "I spent my entire childhood with everyone mad at me. All two of them." Broadway producer and occasional romantic prospect Hal Prince "was born clasping a list of people he wanted to meet." The chapter in which Rodgers recounts losing her virginity is titled "More than Once Upon a Mattress."
In Shy's final chapter, the book's coauthor, Jesse Green (O Beautiful; The Velveteen Father), chief theater critic for the New York Times, relays that due to Rodgers's flagging health as she was dictating her memoirs, some of the words in the main text aren't hers. But Green is more than a sentence doctor: his plentiful footnotes--clarifying and corrective but also witty and wisecracking--give Shy the call-and-response playfulness of a duet. Confiding, blunt, cruel, ribald, dishy and blackly humorous, Shy has all the entertainment value of a first-rate Broadway production, the book's 70-odd photos and reproductions the set dressing. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Confiding, blunt, cruel, ribald, dishy and blackly humorous, Shy is author and composer Mary Rodgers's entertaining chronicle of the New York performing arts world at mid-century and just beyond.