TAKE HART

Star Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater talk to LYNN RUSK about film Blue Moon, a tribute to lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart

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POIGNANT: The film covers the night Hart attended the opening of Rodgers' hit musical, Oklahoma!

FOR more than 20 years, Broadway songwriting duo Lorenz Hart, the lyricist, and Richard Rodgers, the composer, combined their talents to create a string of musical-comedy hits.

Often referred to as America's Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hart are celebrated for classics such as My Funny Valentine, Manhattan and, of course, Blue Moon.

In 1943, the partnership dissolved due to Hart's severe alcoholism and increasing unreliability, prompting Rodgers to form a new collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein.

Rodgers and Hammerstein would go on to become the most successful songwriting team in American musical theatre history, creating landmark works including South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I and The Sound of Music.

Richard Linklater's Blue Moon focuses on the evening of March 31, 1943, when Hart confronts his shattered self-confidence in Sardi's bar as his former collaborator Rodgers celebrates the opening night of his groundbreaking hit Oklahoma!.

The film, written by Robert Kaplow, stars Ethan Hawke as Hart, Fleabag's Andrew Scott as Rodgers, and The Substance's Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland, a Yale student with whom Hart is infatuated.

Ethan, a collaborator with director Richard on the Before trilogy and Boyhood, says he first read the Blue Moon script more than 10 years ago.