Tribute: Mary Rodgers

Mary Rodgers, writer and composer, died on Thursday at age 83.  She was co-creator of the wonderful musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” based on the Princess and the Pea fairy tale.  It was a breakthrough role for Carol Burnett on Broadway.  Here she is singing, “I’m Shy.”

It was remade with Tracy Ullman.

Burnett played the role of the evil Queen.

Rodgers also wrote books for kids that have become classics, especially Freaky Friday, filmed three times, most recently with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

She wrote a two-generation advice column with her mother for McCall’s Magazine and she worked with Leonard Bernstein on his famous series of Young People’s Concerts.

Rodgers was the daughter of one award-winning Broadway composer Richard Rodgers (“South Pacific,” “Pal Joey,” “The Sound of Music”) and the mother of another, Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins” and “The Light in the Piazza”). The New York Times wrote:

“The Light in the Piazza,” Adam Guettel’s 2005 musical, for which he won a Tony for best score, was based on a 1950s novel by Elizabeth Spencer about an American woman traveling in Italy with her mentally disabled daughter, who falls in love with an Italian man. Years ago, Ms. Rodgers had suggested the story to her father as ripe for musicalizing, but he decided against it. Decades later she passed the idea on to her son.

Why, she was asked in 2003, did she not adapt the work herself?

“I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.”