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 was a daughter of composer Richard Rodgers and his wife, Dorothy Belle (née Feiner).
[2] 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.
)[7][8][9] 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.
[10][11] She eventually transitioned into writing children's books, most notably Freaky Friday (1972), which was made into a feature film (released 1976) for which Rodgers wrote the screenplay, and was remade for television in 1995, and again for cinemas in 2003.
She and her second husband, film executive Henry Guettel, had three sons, including Adam, a Tony Award-winning musical theater composer.