Richard Rodgers was born on June 28, 1902. During his 60-year Broadway composing career, he wrote 40 Broadway musicals and 900 songs, not to mention scores for movie and TV musicals, documentaries and a ballet. His career began in 1919 with "Any Old Place with You," which was dropped from A Lonely Romeo but picked up by Remember Mama in 1979, four months before his death.

No wonder his centenary is being celebrated nationwide.

Today's audiences know Richard Rodgers best for his nine-musical collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II, which included Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I.

But before Hammerstein there were 26 stage musicals (and nine screen musicals) with Lorenz Hart, and oh, could you sing to them. Urbane, witty, youthful, they were packed with songs that will be standards as love songs are loved.

Among these gems is The Boys from Syracuse, a musical take on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors: Two pairs of twins, masters and servants, cause almost unending confusion - much of it romantic - in ancient Greece.

Boys plays Thursday-Sunday at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Credit the show's musical director Roger Grodsky for being the "musical archeologist" who headed the "dig" that rediscovered Boys in its original 1938 form.

Mr. Grodsky has spent the last three summers working with the R&H Organization to reconstruct orchestrations for largely forgotten works.

Boxes of material from the Library of Congress, the Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and material from college and university libraries is warehoused by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Mr. Grodsky is the musical archeologist who digs through bits and pieces, even scraps of lyrics written on hotel stationEry, and decides whether there's enough to put together for a performance.

There weren't photocopies then, so Mr. Grodsky found himself trying to steam a glued revision off an original score for I Married an Angel. "That one killed me," he says, because he had to give up. "I wanted to go back in a time machine and stop them" from destroying what are now one-of-a-kind living artifacts.

Richard Rodgers, Mr. Grodsky says unequivocally, was a musical genius, and the best explanation why is in the composer's own words.

"There's a famous quote: `I would go into the dark theater, imagine what was supposed to be happening and write it down,' " Mr. Grodsky laughs with astonishment. "He could do that, it was extraordinary."

CCM's musical theater department has already revived Babes in Arms, and Mr. Grodsky is responsible for re-creating the original after more than 50 years.

Aubrey Berg, musical theater department chairman, directs, and, as in Babes, tweaks the script for modern ears.

Mr. Grodsky says another one he'd love to see is Too Many Girls, "an old-timey college show, with the big football game, the whole thing."

Tickets $23; call 556-4183.

- Jackie Demaline