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Mary Rodgers (January 11, 1931 – June 26, 2014) was an American composer, screenwriter, and author. She wrote the novel Freaky Friday, which served as the basis of a 1976 film starring Jodie Foster, for which she wrote the screenplay, as well as three other versions. Her best-known musicals were Once Upon a Mattress and The Mad Show, and she contributed songs to Marlo Thomas' successful children's album Free to Be... You and Me.
She began writing music at the age of 16 and her professional career began with writing songs for Little Golden Records, which were albums for children with three-minute songs.Leuzzi, Linda. "My interview with Mary Rodgers" . The Long Island Advance, July 3, 2014. Retrieved July 9, 2014. One of these recordings, "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves", which was released in 1957, featured performances by Bing Crosby of songs Mary Rodgers wrote with lyricist Sammy Cahn. She also composed music for television, including the jingle for the Prince Spaghetti commercial.Chapin, Ted. "Mary Rodgers (1931–2014): A Woman of Many Talents". NewMusicBox, July 8, 2014. Retrieved July 9, 2014.
Another significant compositional project for her was The Mad Show, a musical revue based on Mad Magazine which opened Off Broadway in January 1966 and ran for a total of 871 performances. An original cast album, produced by Goddard Lieberson, was released on Columbia Masterworks. Although the show also began as a collaboration with Marshall Barer, he quit before the project was completed and the show's remaining songs feature lyrics by Larry Siegel (co-author of the show's book), Steven Vinaver, and Stephen Sondheim, who contributed the lyrics to a parody of "The Girl from Ipanema" called "The Boy From..." under the pseudonym Esteban Ria Nido. "'Mad Show'". Sondheim Guide. Retrieved July 3, 2011.
None of her other shows had the same level of success, but she also wrote music for Musical theatre and revues, the first on Broadway being Davy Jones' Locker with Bil Baird's marionettes, which had a two-week run at the Morosco Theatre from March 28 to April 11, 1959. (She also wrote the lyrics.) Others included From A to Z (1960), Hot Spot (1963), Working (1978), and Phyllis Newman's one-woman show The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979). A revue of Rodgers's music titled Hey, Love, conceived and directed by Richard Maltby Jr. ran in June 1993 at Eighty-Eight's in New York City.Holden, Stephen. "Mary Rodgers's Songs In a Patchwork on Romance". The New York Times, June 11, 1993. Retrieved June 28, 2014. "Mary Rodgers". IBDb.com.
She later wrote children's books, most notably the popular Freaky Friday (1972), which was made into a feature film (released 1976), for which she wrote the screenplay, and was remade for television in 1995, and again for cinemas in 2003, screenplay by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon "based on the book by Mary Rodgers". "Mary Rodgers". Internet Movie Database ( IMDb.com). Freaky Friday. IMDb.com. Retrieved January 6, 2010
One of the inspirations for Freaky Friday was a novel by Thorne Smith called Turnabout. As she was considering a new children’s book, following several picture books for young children, she remembered "that when I was fourteen, I’d read and loved a novel called Turnabout, by Thorne Smith. Vicious and hilarious, it was something I thought I could emulate in children’s fiction . . . for teens." Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green, Shy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022, pp. 367-368
Rodgers' other children's books include The Rotten Book (1969), A Billion for Boris (1974, later republished under the title ESP TV), and Summer Switch (1982), and she contributed songs to the landmark children's album Free to Be... You and Me. "About Mary Rodgers". CharlotteZolotow.com. Retrieved January 6, 2010. She made a few brief forays back into writing for musical theater, including an adaptation of her book Freaky Friday (featuring music and lyrics by John Forster), which was presented by Theatreworks/USA in 1991, and The Griffin and the Minor Canon, which was produced by Music Theatre Group, but after the latter show she never composed another note of music and never even played the piano again. She later explained, "I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent ... I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things."
In 2022, 8 years after she died, Rodgers' memoirs were published in Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers, Co-Authored by Jesse Green.
Mary Rodgers was a director of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization and a board member of ASCAP. She also served for several years as chairman of the Juilliard School.
She died from heart failure at her home in Manhattan on June 26, 2014.
Publications
(2025). 9780374298623 ISBN 9780374298623
External links
Categories: 1931 Births, 2014 Deaths, 20th-century American Writers, 20th-century American Women Writers, 20th-century American Composers, American Women Children's Writers, American Children's Writers, American Musical Theatre Composers, American People Of German-jewish Descent, Brearley School Alumni, Broadway Composers And Lyricists, Jewish Women Writers, Jewish Women Musicians, Jewish American Songwriters, Juilliard School People, Writers From Manhattan, Screenwriters From New York City, Wellesley College Alumni, 20th-century American Women Composers, 21st-century American Jews, 21st-century American Women
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