Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Only two songs from the stage version were cut, however, “Geraniums in the Winder” (also missing from the original Broadway cast album) and “The Highest Judge of All.” The screenplay also retains much of Hammerstein’s libretto. Nevertheless, Thomas Hischak, who normally demonstrates equanimity in his assessments of film adaptations in Through the Screen Door, describes the Carousel adaptation, directed by Henry King, as “unfaithful, incompetent, and certainly uninspired” and “the most unsatisfying film treatment of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.”3 For a minority report one can turn to an essay by Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans in which the authors describe the dream ballets of Carousel as well as Oklahoma! as works in which “the greater surrealist possibilities of the cinema [are] used to their fullest advantage” and other “ways in which the film is as moving today as when it was made.”4

One of the many ways in which the staged Carousel stands out from conventional musical theater fare is that the main character takes his own life. In Oklahoma! the villain (Jud Fry) kills himself accidentally while in the process of trying to kill the male protagonist (Curly), and film audiences who were seeing the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows in their filmed order had also recently witnessed the death of the King of Siam. Despite this sad eventual turn in the plot, perhaps in an effort to prepare younger viewers and those new to the show for Billy’s death and to reassure them that he was still alive on screen, although technically dead, the film opens in heaven fifteen heavenly minutes later (the equivalent of fifteen years on earth) where Billy tells the story of Carousel, including his death, as if it were a flashback. For those viewers who might view Billy’s suicide as a sin comparable to his decision to commit a robbery in order to get enough money to support the as yet unborn daughter he imagined in “Soliloquy,” the suicide of the stage version was changed to an accidental death. By the end of the film Billy will take advantage of the opportunity to return to earth in order to rectify some of the emotional damage he inflicted on his daughter, Louise, now fifteen earth years old. At the end of the play he succeeds in comforting his troubled daughter at her high school graduation, and when he does, the strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” can move even modern-day cynics to request some tissues.

Even if the film proves disappointing on many levels, it offers the opportunity to get a sense of what audiences saw onstage, including Louise’s dream ballet with choreography pilfered from Agnes de Mille (who had to sue to be properly credited) as well as most of the songs and a large helping of the original stage dialogue. Looking at the scene we focused on in the Carousel chapter, we see that much has been retained. It begins about seven minutes into the film, after the first scene in heaven. Some of “The Carousel Waltz” was heard over the credits—significantly shorn of its dissonant and mysterious opening, which will be heard later with new associations—but a more substantial statement of the waltz, starting with the first main waltz after the introduction, occurs in the transformation from Heaven to Earth. Despite a few cuts here and there, most of the waltz returns when the scene shifts to the amusement park. There it supports the pantomimed prologue that tells us so much about how Billy regards Julie as special and how the carousel proprietress Mrs. Mullin jealously senses an undeniable romance in bloom. With a few small additions and deletions, most of the nonunderscored dialogue with Carrie, Julie, Mrs. Mullin, and Billy that opens act I, scene 2, is preserved.5 All this takes a little over five minutes.

The opening of the Julie and Carrie sequence that precedes “Mr. Snow,” however, with its rhythmic recitative merging into the Julie Jordan tune and the “Mill Theme” is entirely removed from the film.6 As a result, “Mr. Snow” appears after only thirty seconds of underscored dialogue (a little more than 15 minutes into the film), the conversation in which the stage Carrie assumes her friend now has “a feller of yer [your] own.” Now that Julie has Billy, more an intuitive assumption than a reality at this stage in the relationship, Carrie can sing about her feller. Instead of the Julie Jordan music that underscores this conversation in the stage version, when we hear the “Mill Theme” for the first time in the film, it is impossible to understand its significance. By the end of the brief exchange, however, the underscoring will match the musical phrase indicated in the score (this is the musical passage of dotted rhythms and leaps in the deleted sequence illustrated in chapter 9), but now employed with equal meaninglessness. As a result of these liberties, the proof substantiating Carrie’s presumption that Julie has a feller, so clearly explained in their musical exchange onstage but now deleted, creates an abrupt and less convincing transition to Carrie’s song about her feller, “Mr. Snow.”

Billy’s long “Soliloquy” appears boldly without cuts and lasts nearly eight minutes, and earlier “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” continues with an elaborate and athletic dance of New Englanders that lasts nearly six minutes.7 On the other hand, portions of “A Real Nice Clambake” and “When the Children Are Asleep,” including their verses, were cut, and the latter is placed considerably later than in the stage version. In its new context, this song now takes place on a boat Carrie and Mr. Snow are sharing with Julie and Billy on the way to the clambake. Since they are now overheard by the more troubled partners, the contrast between Julie and Billy’s turbulent relationship and the more placid one of Carrie and Enoch is more pronounced. In another departure, the distinctive dissonant chords that open the stage