Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel--what were they trying to get at?

Cafe Society
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I’m not politically correct. I’m perfectly capable of seeing musicals in their historical context. It’s no biggie when Koko the Executioner has “the nigger serenader and the others of his race” on his list of annoying people to execute, but he was talking about guys in blackface, not black people.

When Marie, in Fiorello sings “I shall marry the very next man” there’s a verse, obviously ironic and bitter “…and if he likes me/who cares how frequently he strikes me/I’ll fetch his slippers with my arm in a sling/just for the privilege of wearing his ring.”–no problem.

Hell, in The Fantasticks, there’s the whole “Rape Ballet” number where El Gallo convinces the fathers to pay him to rape ('forgive me, attempted rape") the daughter so the son can save her and be a hero—and I’m cool with it to the point where I can laugh along: “You can get the rape emphatic/you can get the rape polite/you can get the rape with Indians/a truly charming sight/you can get the rape on horseback they all say it’s new and gay/but you see the sort of rape depends on what you pay/it depends on what you pay.” A) It’s clear that no rape will ever occur and B) it shows how bizarrely obsessed the fathers are to get their kids together (it also shows, if done well, how persuasive El Gallo is-the fathers are reluctant at first but half way through the song, they’re offering suggestions)
But Carousel, arguably R&H’s best in terms of the music and staging (the “Bench scene” may be the single peak of the musical’s art–song story and dance in one seamless cohesive perfect whole) has me stumped. Even understanding the context of the time, I don’t get it.

Billy is a punk. He regularly beats Julie (there’s a short, creepy monologue where he defends his beating of her–it’s not just a one time slap, which in a musical can be punctuation rather than abuse–R&H are clear–he’s a wife beater), he tries to commit murder, he does commit suicide, and when he’s put on trial, he’s arrogant about defending himself. Then he goes back down to Earth being told that if he can do just one good deed, he’ll be let into heaven. He steals a star, tries to force it on his mal-adjusted daughter (maladjusted because she’s an outcast–because her father was a murderer and a wife beater) and when she doesn’t take the star from this strange man (she has no idea he’s her dad), Billy hits HER. There’s a creepy scene where the daughter asks Julie “Is it possible for a hit to feel like a kiss” (or to that effect) and Julie agrees. Then everyone gets up and sings “When You Walk Through A Storm”, one of the snobby kids hugs Billy’s daughter and…for some reason…Billy gets into heaven.

What? Why? What did he do? What’s the good deed supposed to be?

I’m 100% certain that Hammerstein (probably the most…human…of all golden-age musical writers who BELIEVED in GOODNESS and FAMILY and COMMUNITY) wasn’t trying to say “Hey, guys, smack your daughers and wives around if you want to get into Heaven” But since that’s the only thing Billy ever actually does, it’s kind of the message.

Any help in interpreting that bit?

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Apparently, he inspires her to have confidence in herself. Plus, he genuinely atones for his actions, which in Christian tradition buys your way into heaven. It is an allegory of redemption and forgiveness.

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I don’t know that he does genuinely atone. His last song is an arrogant “I’m not gonna be sent to hell by some wimpy angels, take me before God himself” number (excluding a quick reprise). He never even apologizes for beating Julie regularly and Lousie once.

I accept the “inspires her” thing, but I’ve never seen that staged to convey that–it doesn’t help that there’s a giant chorus singing “When You Walk Through A Storm”. It’s like listening to the Boston Pops playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” and someone whispering patriotic stuff in your ear. If the music don’t do it, the whispering isn’t going to help.

One interesting bit from the article you linked to that I didn’t know: in the original play, Lilliom (Billy) goes to hell after slapping his daughter. Which implies that Hammerstein (one presumes) tacked on the “upbeat” ending without perhaps thinking it through all the way.

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I absolutely agree with you about Billy – he’s a creep, and the story doesn’t even hold together.

I think Hammerstein was trying to do was portray a lower class/poor couple in a sensitive light and was trying (and failing) to show that Billy was just a victim of his ignorance and environment. But his attitude is full of condescension – “Look at these poor people; they’re really almost as good as we are.”

It doesn’t help that it has one of their weakest scores. Only two decent songs (“Carousel Waltz” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”), two average (“If I Love You” and “June is Busting Out All Over,” which has a nice opening hook and nothing else), several submediocrities, and “Soliloquy,” the most pretentious and obnoxious piece of tuneless nonsense to ever grace a Broadway stage,* pure emotional drivel that’s about as deep as a Christmas card and ultimately comes to the conclusion that the best thing to do for you children is become a criminal for them.

Hammerstein was probably thinking he was doing for class relations what he tried to do for race relations in South Pacific, but Billy is just such a creepy and limited character (and Julie is about 20 IQ points short of being a total airhead), that the entire thing makes you feel disgust.

*And, yes, I’ve considered all of Stephen Sondheim.

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This.

They were trying to create an anti-hero and tell a tale of the working class…and they failed miserably. At the end of the day the attempt was more important than the result, and that’s the only reason that anyone knows about Carosel today. It was a groundbreaking work because it was the first time anything like that had been tried in a Musical. It doesn’t make it any good though. It’s a confused mess of a play, but in the end it’s *supposed *to be about redemption.

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Carousel isn’t one of my favorites; for that matter, R & H aren’t my favorite musical team. Notice how someone dies in most of their musicals? I think they were trying to change the perception of musicals as simple light-hearted fare. It works in Oklahoma!, but I have to agree with your assessment of Carousel.

Just a slight hijack in defense of Jones & Schmidt:
Remember, The Fantasticks was written 50 years ago. Although the word “rape” has always had the meaning it has now, I think they meant it in its more classical meaning of “abduction” or “theft” (as in the poem The Rape of the Lock).

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Not THAT groundbreaking … .

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I disagree that the “working class” is why it’s remembered. The music is solid, and as I mentioned, the “bench” scene (Julie and Carrie on the bench, waiting for Billy followed by Julie and Billy–includes “You’re A Queer One, Julie Jordan” and “If I Loved You”) is an absolute masterpiece of staging and musicality–with spoken word blending seamlessly into song into dance and then back into spoken word–it may be the apotheosis of the musical. That kind of perfect blend of acting, song and dance had never been done so well before (and I can’t think of many done as well after)

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Yeah, but…You can’t really count what Brecht was doing.

  1. Rogers and Hammerstien were trying to make musicals more realistic, Brecht was trying to do essentially the opposite.

  2. It was a different style of theatre and while both are loosely considered to be musicals they weren’t really working in the same genre.

Also, Brecht wasn’t sucessful on Broadway for at least a decade after the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals (starting with Oklahoma!) first started appearing, and his acceptance is lagely due to them clearing the path. I am at work, so sorry for lack of good cites, but Threepenny closed on Broadway after an absurdly short run because it was too different from what the mainstream would accept.

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Sorry, this is what I get for posting before coffee and trying to get out a slapdash answer. See my above post for further clarification. BUT the music isn’t anything fantastic. It’s solid, but so what? Lots of musicals have solid music, the music in Carosel isn’t (for the most part) exceptional.

You can’t count staging. Sorry, but that isn’t Rogers and Hammerstein, that would be (I believe Gene Kelly*) the director.

As far as spoken word blending into song etc, I agree, that is a large part of what makes it groundbreaking. The attempt was to bring realism and “modern” stage techniques to Musicals, writing about the working class was only part of that. On the whole they were trying to take the musical from being a “dialog, musical number, dance number” one two three, and turn it into it’s own whole piece. I think they did this better in Oklahoma!, where the story is less of a mess. But the attempt is noteworthy. Particularly since they were writing a play about someone who is essentially a bad guy that the audience *isn’t *supposed to like or sympathise with until the end.
*nope, I am wrong. Rouben Mamoulian. I don’t know where I got Gene Kelly from.

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Especially when you consider that Brecht’s work was based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera which was written in the 18th century and is considered to be one of the first musical comedies.

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Which doesn’t contradict my point, or my response to Pochacco. You are supposed to sympathise with the protagonist in Beggers opera. It wasn’t until Threepenny that Mack was cast as a somewhat dispicable character.

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My opinion of the music is a little higher than RealityChuck’s . . . I would put “If I Loved You” on the same level of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” . . . and I believe the music carries the show for most people, in spite of the obvious failures (I’m sure there are even some people who actually enjoy “Soliloquy”).

But regarding the final scene: Billy doesn’t just come down and hit his daughter; he steals a star for her. What can be a greater symbolic act of love than stealing a star for someone? And then the little ungrateful brat rejects it . . . rejects his love and repentance . . . and, true to character, the only way he knows how to deal with that rejection is to hit her. Yet apparently it didn’t even hurt, it felt like a kiss. (Just like her sappy mother, and true to the times it was written, she equates abuse with love.) So his good deed is his act of love and repentance toward his daughter, whose life has been screwed up because of him, through no fault of her own . . . and his act turns her life around.

Off-topic: I’m always confusing “You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan” with “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” But that’s just me.

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Since I’m not really fan of musicals and have only really seen the 1956 movie version of “Carousel” (which, in my opinion, could’ve been really great film for reasons I’ll discuss later), you probably can take my view of the musical with the proverbial grain of salt, but I find Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Carousel” to be an example of a someone’s greatly flawed piece of work being more interesting than his (or their in this case) more artistically successful ones.

There are a lot disparate oil-and-water elements in “Carousel” that really have no business being together. On one hand, you have the story of the marital and economic struggles of Julie–a former low paid mill employee–and Billie–a sketchy loser who’s prone to domestic abuse and has trouble holding on to a “real” job–in late 19th century Maine. At the same time, you have a mostly upbeat score, folksy characterizations, and a completely cornball depiction of the afterlife. These things don’t blend and yet the clash makes “Carousel” all the more interesting.

Incidentally, the posts about Brecht and Weill are fitting because I think if you go back in time and somehow could cosmically right an act of artistic injustice, it would make far more sense for Brecht and Weill to do a musical adaptation of “Liliom” (the play on which “Carousel” is based) than Rodgers & Hammerstein.

As for the film version, it was originally supposed to have Frank Sinatra as Bigelow and Judy Garland as Julie but Garland had too many personal problems to be considered reliable and was recast with Shirley Jones. Then, several days after production began, Sinatra quit due over a pay dispute. (Each scene was going to be shot twice–one version for ‘regular" movie screens and another for wide screens. Sinatra wanted to be paid for each version but the studio–20th Century Fox–balked so he walked off the set. Ironically, Fox decided to abandon the two separate scene approach for the movie shortly thereafter.) Instead, Bigelow was played Gordon MacRae who had just recently played another Curly in the successful film version of R&H’s Oklahoma and the movie suffered as result. At the time, Sinatra was still a few years away from his “Rat Pack” and “Chairman of the Board” persona and was at his peak as both an actor and a singer. With regard to the former, this was a couple years after his Oscar for **From Here to Eternity **when he was playing such edgy darker roles as the assassin in Suddenly and the drug addict in The Man with the Golden Arm. As a singer, Sinatra had finally departed the purgatory that was Columbia Records where Mitch Miller had him recording second-rate material and novelty songs for Capitol where he had just recorded his classic “In the Wee Small Hours” and "Songs for Swingin’ Lovers" albums. These records not only put him back at the top of the charts but also demonstrated a greater depth as a vocalist. When you add to that Sinatra’s public reputation as a moody and mercurial ex-Bobby Soxer idol with underworld ties, you would’ve had someone who would’ve been ideal to depict the complexly dualistic nature of Bigelow. Unfortunately, that was not to be and MacRae was too much of a lightweight to carry it off.

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Or one of their weakest stories.

Fenris, I think you’re trying to overinterpret. Many musicals of the era don’t hold together once they’re torn apart. Brigadoon comes to mind.

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That would be me. It’s the best song in play and one of the best ever. I don’t find any of the others in the play particularly special.

I agree with everyone about the play itself. I have no sympathy for Billy and he didn’t earn his place in heaven.

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I can only listen to “Soliloquy” if it’s sung by John Raitt, definitely NOT MacRae or Sinatra.

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Weakest R&H ever, but one that had some promise just by its quirkiness.

Great songs: The Carousel Waltz and If I Loved You.

On the other hand: That Was a Real Nice Clambake.

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I’d argue that it’s their weakest score-that would be either “Pipe Dream” or if you’re including movies “State Fair”. (“Our state fair is a great state fair!/Don’t miss it, don’t even be late!/It’s dollars to donuts that our state fair/is the best state fair in the state” repeated about 5000 times) or (“All I know, all I owe/I owe I-ow-ay/I owe I-ow-ay more than I can ever pay/So I think I’ll move to Cal-if-orn-i-ay”)

Hell, of the big 5 R&Hs, I’d suggest that Sound of Music is probably weaker as a score-especially lyrically (“Like a lark who is learning to pray”) or (“Whiskers on kittens/bright copper kettles/and warm woolen mittens”). There’s only one or two songs with actual emotion and much of the rest is manufactured treacle. Granted–manufactured treacle sounds GREAT when Julie Andrews sings it…but hell, if Julie Andrews recited the NYC Phone Directory it would sound great. Other recordings of Sound of Music show this weakness. (IIRC, Hammerstein was pretty ill when he wrote the lyrics.)

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I have to agree about “State Fair.” It has some of the most cringeworthy lyrics since Ira Gershwin, who penned some of the greatest and also most abysmally awful lyrics ever (“We’re the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine Supreme Court judges.”)