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

greater toll. By the end of act II, Mr. Snow’s verbal abuse and condescension have at least partially stifled his formerly spunky bride, whereas Julie Bigelow never fears to stand up to her husband. When Mr. Snow and Carrie glorify their conventional and quotidian life in their duet, “When the Children Are Asleep,” it is difficult not to notice that Enoch’s love for Carrie is based on her maintaining a conventional image as the “little woman.” Billy and Julie may each lose their jobs within minutes of their meeting, certainly a bad omen for their future stability, but their inarticulate and unexpressed love contains a richness lacking in the conventional courtship and marriage of Enoch and Carrie.

On the surface Enoch and Carrie conclude their act I duet “When the Children Are Asleep” in a close harmony that befits their harmonious image of marital bliss. Nevertheless, this happiness depends in large part on Carrie’s willingness to overlook the fact that Mr. Snow makes all the plans for the two of them. Snow also adds musical injury to emotional insult by interrupting Carrie’s turn at the chorus, ironically with the words “dreams that won’t be interrupted.” Billy may be a surly bully who occasionally strikes his wife offstage, but he never interrupts Julie when they sing. Unlike Snow, Billy allows his future bride to complete her song.25 Perhaps more significantly, when he sings by himself, Billy allows Julie’s character—musically depicted by dotted rhythms and triplets—to infiltrate his thoughts and become a part of him. The pretentiousness of Mr. Snow and his fleet of nine offspring may cause many in the audience to take pity on Carrie for having so many children, one more than she had agreed to when Snow presented his blueprint in the verse of “When the Children Are Asleep.” Given the choice of negatives, it is certainly possible that one might prefer the fuller albeit deeply troubled lives of Billy, Julie, and, after Billy’s death, their daughter Louise, to the deceptively happily-ever-after, rudely interrupted American dream of Mr. and Mrs. Snow and their brood.

Since revivals say as much about directors and their audiences as they do about the works being revived, it is not surprising that the Carousel of the 1990s emphasizes the show’s “dark side,” which was very dark indeed for the 1940s. It is also not surprising that the primary means to convey this dark side and thereby establish the work’s modernity and contemporary relevance is through staging. In a bold rethinking of the work, director Nicholas Hytner took the liberty of opening his Carousel at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center on March 24, 1994, not with the amusement park but at the Bascombe Cotton Mill. In this new setting (underscored musically by the “moderato” introduction to the sequence of fast waltzes) audiences could for the first time watch the young women mill workers “gaze absentminded at the roof” and perhaps also at the large clock about to strike six o’clock. “As the waltz gains momentum,” wrote Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News, “carousel horses begin circling the stage, the top of the carousel lowers into place, and the girls find release riding up and down under the admiring gaze of the handsome barker, Billy Bigelow. It takes your breath away.”26

Reviewers were almost unanimous in praising “the most dazzling staging this musical is ever going to receive.”27 Two critics were even moved to repeat the old joke about leaving a show “humming the scenery.” Others singled out the multiracial casting. Enoch and Carrie were a mixed-race couple in both the London and New York revivals; in a stylistic as well as a racial crossover, the role of Nettie was sung by the African American Shirley Verrett, a major opera star in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Hytner’s staging also intensified Billy’s more sinister side. For example, no longer does Billy slap his daughter’s hand when he returns to earth, he slaps her face. Thankfully, most critics, while rightly repulsed by a romanticized wife-beating hero who gains salvation (even though he does not get to sing his powerful musical plea, “The Highest Judge of All,” in the second act), refused to confuse the message with the messenger. In the words of medieval scholar John Boswell, “To cite obscenity is not to be obscene.”28 In any event, Edwin Wilson concludes in the Wall Street Journal that “in the end, it is not Julie who can redeem Billy, but the musical alchemy of Richard Rodgers’s score.”29

In Musical Stages Rodgers speaks of a rhyming and rhythmic dialogue used in Mamoulian’s films Love Me Tonight and The Phantom President in 1932 and the next year in Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. Rodgers, who preferred the term “musical dialogue” to describe the use of rhymed conversation with musical accompaniment, wrote that its purpose was “to affect a smoother transition to actual song” and to become “an authentic part of the action.”30 Twelve years later Rodgers transferred the device of “musical dialogue” to the stage to begin the Julie and Carrie sequence. In this new context the two friends begin each phrase with the rhythmic signature of Julie’s name before it develops into a melodic theme, thus adding one additional layer to the dialogue-(spoken) verse-(musical speech) chorus (the main tune) progression from speech to song familiar from most theater songs of the 1920s and 1930s. By the time Billy arrives, her motive underscores their conversation before they even begin to sing. In the course of the scene the rhythm of Julie’s name becomes the foundation for a series of questions (three or four syllables each) that Billy asks her about her love life: “Where’d you walk?,” “In the woods?,” “On the beach?,” and “Did you love him?”

Also in his autobiography Rodgers reveals his sensitivity to potential word painting. In the discussion of “It Might as Well Be Spring” noted earlier and illustrated in Example 9.2c, Rodgers concludes that “since the song is sung by a young girl who can’t quite understand