Who doesn’t love Oklahoma!, the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein extravaganza that kicked off what’s often called the golden age of musical theater? If you don’t find your toes a-tapping to jaunty little numbers about courting your sweetie in a humble, fringe-draped carriage or using pachyderm metrics to determine the height of certain cornstalks, you just might be dead. That, or you’re the spiritual kin of Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers’ first—and, to some of us, finest—writing partner. Hart, who died in 1943 at age 48, was the lyricist behind standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” songs dappled with every color of elation or heartbreak, even as they glittered with self-deprecating humor. He was the thinking, feeling person’s lyricist, alive to everything life could dish out; and when it came to romantic misery, he took the punches for us so they wouldn’t hurt so much.
Hart didn’t have a particularly happy life: he struggled with depression and alcoholism, not to mention unrequited love; he was most definitely gay, though like many gay men of his era, he conducted himself with discretion. But despite carrying all that sadness, he left us an abundant legacy of joy, and it’s that poignant balance of darkness and light that director Richard Linklater captures so beautifully in Blue Moon, set in the last months of Hart’s life.
Ethan Hawke plays Hart; the setting, for the most part, is Sardi’s, the Broadway hangout where directors and actors would gather, post-performance on opening night, to wait for the reviews to roll in. Hart isn’t supposed to be drinking; he’s been trying to get off the sauce. But bars are convivial places, and right now Hart needs that connection. He greets the bartender, Bobby Cannavale’s Eddie, like a long-lost brother. The two trade quips from Casablanca. He wheedles one drink from his friend—followed by another, and another. He…
