For 40 Years, He Climbed Ev’ry Mountain for Rodgers & Hammerstein

Ted Chapin steps down as the head of the organization that makes sure you revisit “Oklahoma!” and keep hearing “The Sound of Music.”

In 1981, two years after the death of Richard Rodgers and 21 years after the death of Oscar Hammerstein II, Ted Chapin got a call from Rodgers’s daughter Mary, asking if he’d like to run the Rodgers & Hammerstein office. That’s all “R&H,” as it has always been called, amounted to then: the place where the work of managing the pair’s many musical theater properties was conducted. But in the 40 years since, it would become much more, as the office turned into an “organization” and the business of exploiting copyrights by making new shoes from old leather changed drastically. Chapin, 70, recently stepped down from the job he started when he was just 30 and so untried that his first two years were probational. He had been hired partly because the Rodgerses were friends of his parents: Elizabeth Steinway, of the piano family, and the arts administrator Schuyler Chapin. It didn’t hurt that while in college, he was a production assistant on “Follies” — an experience he would later mine in writing the classic backstage memoir “Everything Was Possible.” According to Mary Rodgers, he also had at least one other asset: great hair.