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

Richard Rodgers, walking back to the hotel with his collaborator afterwards, put it to Oscar Hammerstein bluntly:

“We’ve got to get God out of that parlor!”

Mild Oscar Hammerstein agreed.

“I know you’re right,” he said. “But where shall I put Him?”

“I don’t care where you put Him,” said Richard Rodgers. “Put Him up on a ladder, for all I care, only get Him out of that parlor!”

So Oscar Hammerstein put Him up on a ladder. He discarded the sitting room too, and put his deity into a brand new sequence. On a ladder in the backyard of heaven, He became the Star-Keeper, polishing stars which hung on lines strung across the floor of infinity, while a sullen Billy Bigelow looked and listened to his quiet admonitions.4

Carousel’s premiere took place at the Majestic Theatre on April 19, and the show closed a little more than two years later on May 24, 1947, after a run of 890 performances. Following a successful national tour, Carousel began another impressive run of 566 performances at London’s Drury Lane on June 7, 1950 (closing on October 13, 1951). Major New York revivals took place at the New York City Center Light Opera in 1954, 1957, and 1967; at the Music Theater of Lincoln Center in 1965; and in 1994 with an acclaimed New York staging based on the Royal National Theater of Great Britain production.

Almost without exception Carousel opened to rave reviews. Nevertheless, most critics could not resist the temptation to compare the new work to Oklahoma!, then beginning its third year on Broadway. Although an anonymous reviewer in the New York World-Telegram found “the distinct flavor of ‘Oklahoma!’” in “A Real Nice Clambake,” persistent rumors that the latter song once belonged to the former and titled “A Real Nice Hayride,” are unsubstantiated.5 Ward Morehouse’s review in the New York Sun is representative in its conclusion that the laudatory Carousel could not quite match the earlier masterpiece: “‘Carousel,’ a touching and affecting musical play, is something rare in the theater. It’s a hit, and of that there can be no doubt. If it is not the musical piece to challenge ‘Oklahoma’ for all-time honors it is certainly one that deserves its place in the 44th Street block. The team of Rodgers and Hammerstein will go on forever.”6

A handful of reviewers regarded the new musical more favorably than its predecessor. According to John Chapman, “‘Carousel’ is one of the finest musical plays I have seen and I shall remember it always. It has everything the professional theatre can give it—and something besides: heart, integrity, an inner glow.”7 Although reviewers then and now found the second-act ballet too long, Robert Garland wrote that “when somebody writes a better musical play than ‘Carousel,’ written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein will have to write it.”8

By the time it returned to New York in 1954 the climate of critical opinion had shifted further, and Brooks Atkinson could now write that Carousel “is the most glorious of the Rodgers and Hammerstein works.” Atkinson continued: “Three of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows have had longer runs than ‘Carousel.’ It is the stepchild among ‘Oklahoma!’ ‘South Pacific,’ and ‘The King and I.’ But when the highest judge of all hands down the ultimate verdict, it is this column’s opinion that ‘Carousel’ will turn out to be the finest of their creations. If it were not so enjoyable, it would probably turn out to be opera.”9

Carousel would also remain the pride and joy of its creators. For Rodgers, especially, the second musical with Hammerstein stood as his personal favorite among all his forty musicals. Without any false sense of modesty he conveyed his reasons: “Oscar never wrote more meaningful or more moving lyrics, and to me, my score is more satisfying than any I’ve ever written. But it’s not just the songs; it’s the whole play. Beautifully written, tender without being mawkish, it affects me deeply every time I see it performed.”10

The above critical reception and the judgment of its authors partially explains why Carousel and not Oklahoma! was selected for examination in the present survey. But given the importance attributed to Oklahoma! as the “Eroica” Symphony of the American musical, the question “Why not Oklahoma!?” nevertheless lingers and needs to be addressed. The simple answer is that Oklahoma!’s incalculable historical importance as the musical that changed all musicals is equaled and arguably surpassed dramatically and musically by Carousel. Not content to merely duplicate their earlier success, Rodgers and Hammerstein in their second musical attempted to convey a still richer dramatic situation with characters who were perhaps more complexly realized, through music, than the inhabitants of the Oklahoma Territory.

Further, the artistic ambitions in Carousel are matched by a deeper relationship between music and drama. The integrated songs in Oklahoma! grow naturally from the action and reflect each character’s idiosyncratic nature. But, like Show Boat and Porgy and Bess before it and West Side Story after, the music of Carousel develops action and explores nuances of characterization that frequently transcend what the characters themselves understand.11 The analysis that follows will suggest how Rodgers and Hammerstein’s imitation may have surpassed (artistically if not in popularity) not only its model but many other musicals that have had their two or more hours’ traffic on the Broadway stage.

The “Bench Scene”

In several respects Julie Jordan, who moves us by her ability to see the good qualities in her abusive husband, Billy Bigelow, and by her uncompromising loyalty to his memory, bears a stronger kinship to Hammerstein’s Show Boat heroine Magnolia Ravenal than to Oklahoma!’s Laurey. Even the message of its central song, “What’s the Use of Wondrin,’” like that of Carousel as a whole, echoes Hammerstein’s theme in Show Boat as embodied in the song “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”: once fate brings two lovers together “all the rest is talk.” Julie shares with Magnolia rather than her Oklahoma cousin a common destiny—to love