A year or three ago, the U.S. Postal Service came out with these six stamps honoring great Broadway composers. Someone recently gave me a pane of them and they got me thinking. These men all did their major work in a 40 year period (30 if you leave out the Gershwins) and they hardly had the field to themselves. If the U.S.P.S. had done six or even ten more stamps, they'd have had no trouble finding worthy candidates: Jule Styne, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, etc. If they tried to do stamps covering the last 30-40 years, they'd be hard-pressed to find six. Sondheim, certainly. Jerry Herman, I would imagine.
And then the next stop after that is Andrew Lloyd Webber. At that point, it would cease to be much of an honor. It is also worth noting that, in my last few trips to New York, the musical shows I've attended have, as often as not, been shows written by the guys on the stamps above.
Another thought I had about these stamps is that whoever decided what stamps would be on the same row was trying to make a small historical statement. The Gershwins are on the same tier as Lerner and Loewe, which is vaguely symbolic. A lot of critics hailed the latter as the successor to the former. (Also, Lerner won an Academy Award — a major turning point in his career — for adapting the Gershwin's work into the movie, An American in Paris.)
The second row of stamps has Lorenz Hart on the left, Rodgers & Hammerstein to the right. Rodgers and Hart, of course, were a team and due to Hart's drinking and decaying work habits, Rodgers finally left him and began collaborating, with greater success, with Hammerstein. Don't those two stamps, viewed as a unit, look like Hart is looking with mixed emotion at his former collaborator who has not only left their partnership but his stamp, as well?
Lastly, we have the pairing of Meredith Willson and Frank Loesser. The connect here is that Willson's best works were published by Loesser's music company, done under his encouragement…and have always been dogged by rumors that Loesser ghost-wrote or ghost-rewrote certain key numbers.
This may seem like I'm projecting history where none was intended…but there are 720 different ways to arrange six stamps and this is the only one where the honorees on each tier have anything in common with one another.