Broadway's Watershed Moments: How “Carousel” Changed Broadway
by Ashley Griffin, Guest Editorial
Editor’s Note: Later this month, a musical will be having its world premiere. While I can’t legally provide too many details about the show(I certainly will after it opens), what I can say is that it’s magnificent. It is so good, in fact, that I feel it will provide a monumental shift in the way musical theatre is composed, cast, staged, etc. When thinking about the history of Broadway, I feel this has only happened a handful of times. To discuss this more, Ashley Griffin has written the following series to talk about each show that had such an impact. ~ Chris Peterson
To read the earlier parts of this series, click below:
Traditionally, it’s “Oklahoma” that makes the list of “top five most influential musicals.” After all, what Hammerstein started with “Show Boat” namely fully integrating musical theater (meaning using singing, dancing and acting equally to advance the story), he solidified with “Oklahoma” - especially given the remarkable work of choreographer Agnes DeMille.
But, as Sondheim said (having seen both the original productions of “Oklahoma” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s second offering, “Carousel”):
“Oklahoma was about a picnic. Carousel was about life and death.”
Indeed, “Carousel” moved Sondheim so much that he spent the majority of the show crying on Mrs. Hammerstein’s shoulder – running her mink.
Rodgers and Hammerstein took what had worked so beautifully in “Oklahoma” to the next level with “Carousel.” “Oklahoma” is marked by, for lack of a better definition, sincerity of patriotism (something that hit hard and powerfully in a society in the midst of World War II. “Oklahoma” became a bastion of what American soldiers were fighting FOR, the country they loved and wanted to protect), whereas “Carousel” is marked by flat out earnest sincerity.
Adapted from the 1909 Ferenc Molnár book “Liliom” (“Oklahoma was based on the 1931 Lynn Riggs play “Green Grow the Lilacs”), the 1945 musical “Carousel” tells the story of a carousel barker, Billy Bigelow, and a young mill worker, Julie Jordan.
They fall in love, get married, and Julie gets pregnant. But Billy has a lot of demons – mainly the fact that he’s abusive and hits Julie on multiple occasions, exacerbated by the fact that he has no actual trade and can’t provide for his family (he was kicked off the carousel when he started seeing Julie, just as Julie lost her job at the mill when she started seeing Billy.) They’ve been living off the charity of Julie’s aunt, which Billy finds emasculating.
Determined to be a good provider for his soon-to-arrive child, he teams up with his buddy, a shady character named Jigger, to pull off a robbery. The robbery goes very, very wrong, and Billy ends up dying. Act one ends with Julie in despair, not knowing how she will survive as a single mother. Her aunt sings the iconic song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
Act two is highly experimental for a 1940’s musical. We open with Billy, now in the afterlife, where he and others are tasked with polishing the stars. He learns that he has the chance to go back to earth for one day to rectify the mistakes he made in life. Proud to the very end, he doesn’t feel he needs to fix anything, but he changes his mind when he learns that his now teenage daughter, Louise, is struggling… she’s just like her father and has had a difficult time growing up as the “poor” girl in town. Billy goes back to earth… and promptly resumes his old ways - even hitting Louise in the brief moment when he chooses to let her see him.
At the end of the day, he watches Louise graduate from high school with her classmates. The local doctor gives a beautiful speech and reprises “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Billy manages to get Louise to really hear and believe the words of the song, and communicate to Julie that he always loved her, even though he never actually said it (we’ll get to that in a bit.)
Now, yes, let’s address the elephant in the room – the way Billy’s abuse is dealt with is incredibly problematic, glaringly so in 2024. At the time, Billy was meant to come across as a good man at heart, but one with many demons to exorcise. He doesn’t hit TOO “hard,” and he doesn’t “plan” to abuse the women in his life. This treatment is capped by the immensely inappropriate dialogue between Louise and Julie:
Louise: Mama, there was a man here…and he hit me…hard…but I didn’t feel it…
Julie: I believe you, Louise.
Louise: Mama, is it possible that someone could hit you, hit you hard, hit you real loud and hard… and you not feel it?
Julie: Yes Louise, it is possible for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and you not feel a thing…
(For further commentary, check out this parody video of that exact moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBL453wiRY )
Revivals of “Carousel” have struggled to contend with this element of the show, with some productions receiving permission to flat out cut that dialogue between Louise and Julie altogether, but it is an element intrinsically baked into the show and is the biggest stumbling block to modern interpretations.
But let’s put that aside for now.
Jessie Mueller and Joshua Henry in the 2018 revival of “Carousel” (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
There are two structural elements to the show that are flat-out masterpieces and, I believe, advanced the musical theater artform more so than any show since “Show Boat.” And they were both tremendously experimental for their time.
The first is the infamous opening section of the show, typically dubbed “The Bench Scene.” It is such a seamless and profound piece of writing that it is studied in nearly every musical theater performance class in the world and is the paradigm of the melding of song and book scenes to advance a story. It is considered a perfect musical theater “scene.”
“The Bench Scene” (centered on the song “If I Loved You”) is an extended, uninterrupted sequence at the beginning of Act One that lasts about ten minutes. It starts with Billy and Julie meeting alone for the very first time, her as an innocent young girl (though very aware of Billy’s philandering, manipulative reputation.)
She knows he flirts with girls so he can steal their money and that he never wants to settle down. Billy can’t understand why she would want to stay and spend time with him, knowing all that, and is intrigued by her. By the latter half of the sequence, both Billy and Julie have chosen to stay with each other - at the cost of their respective jobs, and by the end, they’re basically engaged. They never say “I love you” once during the entire number.
This idea of the “Don’t Say ‘I Love You’ I Love You Song” became a Rodgers and Hammerstein staple – starting with “People Will Say We’re in Love” in “Oklahoma” (a fun, flirty song) and mastered in “Carousel.” They would go on to use the conceit in numerous shows (think “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” in “Cinderella”) or even “Something Wonderful” in “The King and I.”
But in “Carousel,” it has special dramaturgical significance. Julie and Billy metaphorically dance around each other, each expressing what they would do or feel IF they loved the other but insisting they don’t. They don’t want to scare the other off; they don’t want to risk being vulnerable. That would be fine on its own, but then the writers pull the sucker punch of using “If I Loved You” to drive home a tremendously powerful ending with what are, on the surface, the schmaltziest words you could end a show with.
For three hours, Billy and Julie have “loved each other hard” but have never actually expressed their feelings to each other. Care and vulnerability are big themes of this show, and Julie (and Billy especially) are always, at least a little, trying to protect themselves.
Then Billy gets the opportunity to return to Earth for one day and right his wrongs. He ends up getting the chance to say one thing to Julie (and not even face to face, more as words in her head.) How can he sum up all the feelings he’s kept locked up his whole life? His humiliation at the way he treated her? Let Julie know she’s not all alone, that he wanted to care for her, not abandon her and Louise(keep in mind, at least as far as we know, Julie never finds out that the reason Billy was a part of the robbery was to provide for his family. For all she knew he could be trying to get money to leave them).
Just as Billy is being forced back to the afterlife, he leans down and says in Julie’s ear the final spoken line of the show:
“I loved you, Julie. Know that I loved you.”
Her face lights up, and she bursts into tears.
The words that couldn’t be said during an entire ten-minute love song are finally said at the eleventh hour, and let me tell you, everyone in the theater is a blubbering mess.
But leave that as the last line without “If I Loved You” and we’d all be rolling our eyes.
The other remarkable structural element is the treatment of the secondary female lead of the show – Carrie.
Now, it’s a stock element of musical theater that there is a “leading” couple (think Laurie and Curly in “Oklahoma”) and a “secondary/comic” couple (Will and Ado Annie.) One is the “serious” couple that goes through the main arc of the story; the other is basically only there for comic relief. Though it has softened its binary tone, it is still a mainstay of most contemporary musical theater (an overt example would be the leading couple of Elle and Emmett and the comic couple of Paulette and the UPS Guy in “Legally Blonde.)
Nowadays, the “secondary” couple doesn’t have to be rooted in comedy (for example, Natalie and Henry in “Next to Normal,” but they usually have at least more comic elements than the main couple. In “Hadestown”, for example, Orpheus and Eurydice are the main couple, Hades and Persephone are the secondary couple. Hades and Persephone may not be a chuckle a minute, but they do get most of the laughs (of the few there are in such a serious story) in the show (excepting Orpheus’s endearing awkwardness when he meets Eurydice for the first time.)
On the surface, “Carousel” follows this to the letter. Julie and Billy are the leading couple, Carrie and her beau Mr. Snow are the comic couple (Carrie certainly gets most of the laughs in the show.) But when you really look at it, you see that Rodgers and Hammerstein have actually flipped the script without any of us noticing.
See, in pretty much any other musical Carrie and Mr. Snow would be the leading couple. Take away the foil of Julie and Billy, and you have two strong, smart, loveable people falling in love, going through some traditional musical theater capers mainly involving innocence and misunderstanding, and they end up together, in a happy marriage, well off and with lots of children. Carrie even gets an “I Want” song before Julie does (and Julie’s is a very untraditional one. You could argue that “If I Loved You” is both Julie and Billy’s “I Want Song” (their mutual “want” being to express their love to the other)).
Carrie gets the much more traditional “I Want” song, “Mr. Snow” right at the top of the show. Carrie may be naïve, but Ado Annie she is not. She is down to earth and is the “rational” voice on Julie’s shoulder throughout the entire story. She turns her back on “bad guy” Billy instantaneously, in the way that pretty much any other musical theater heroine would (the comic foil would usually be the one to foolishly fall for their charms.)
So, with Carry and Snow you get a traditional musical theater couple.
But then, next to them, you get a couple dealing with such intense real-world issues and challenges that any “traditional musical theater character” would look like the comic foil in comparison, like if you put Julie and Billy in “Oklahoma”, Laurie and Curly would start to look like the comic relief.
To me, this is exemplified in the brilliant juxtaposition of act one’s “There’s Nothing So Bad For A Woman” with the song that immediately follows, “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’”. “There’s Nothing So Bad For A Woman” is a “Carrie song”, though it’s sung TO Carrie rather than Carrie singing it. Basically, on his way to the robbery with Billy, Jigger decides to have a little fun - at the local clam bake while all the attendees are on a scavenger hunt Jigger corners Carrie alone and points out how easy it would be for someone like him to assault a defenseless woman like her. He offers to show her some self-defense moves (which she’s not bad at). But when Mr. Snow comes around the corner, he thinks Carrie is cheating on him and breaks off their engagement. Carrie is devastated, and as she sobs, all her friends basically console her by singing about how all men are pigs, and you shouldn’t bother with them.
And then Carrie turns to Julie – who has been listening, but is the only one not singing – and asks what she thinks. And Julie sings “What’s the Use of Wond’rin” – one of the greatest songs in the musical theater cannon – which basically expresses the inexpressible feeling of being in love with someone…of feeling called to love them by a power greater than yourself – even though you know that logically it’s a terrible idea. It’s an abused woman trying to wrap her head around why she’s staying with her abuser… she doesn’t justify it… she doesn’t say it’s “right”… she just tries to make sense of her feelings, and calls the others out on their petty drama and gossip. She starts the song with:
“What’s the use of wond’rin if he’s good or if he’s bad
Or if you like the way he wears his hat?”
And the last lyric of the song is:
“And all the rest is talk.”
Seriously? We’re going to gossip and bitch about the way our boyfriend wears his hat? I’ve got real things to deal with… Stop acting silly and go make up with the love of your life… ‘cause not all of us have it that easy.
We, as the audience, can fill in in between the lines, “Hey Carrie… I’m so sorry for that screwball comedy misunderstanding between you and your fiancé that can easily be rectified in a thirty-second conversation (and is)… but we here in the real world are trying to wrestle with complex and very very serious emotions and relationship dynamics that don’t have an easy answer.”
Easy answers had traditionally been the bread and butter of musicals (seriously, in “Oklahoma” all the drama could have been avoided if Laurie just told Judd she couldn’t go to the picnic with him…)
And when Julie sings it, all the other characters on stage are clearly shook. It’s (for lack of a better description) the 1945 equivalent of if Ruth Bader Ginsberg walked onstage during Elle’s second act dark night of the soul “Legally Blonde” (in “Legally Blonde”) and sang a power ballade about her experiences fighting for women’s rights.
“Sorry people judge you for your hair color, but let’s talk about what it was like for a woman to fight against sexual discrimination in Washington in the 1960’s”
Carrie gets a traditional musical theater happy ending – she marries Mr. Snow, has a bunch of children, and is filthy rich.
Julie ends the show as a single mother with no prospects for her or, likely, her daughter. But she ends with joy and hope – and that’s the point of the story. She sings in “What’s the Use of Wond’rin”:
“Common sense may tell you that the ending will be sad
And now’s the time to break and run away”
Well, that’s exactly what happens. The end is and she would have been better off if she’d left right then. And yet somehow the show isn’t a tragedy. This isn’t “Medea.” But it’s not a comedy (as “Oklahoma” ultimately is.)
The show also makes extraordinary use of its dream ballet – in this case it’s primarily danced by Louise and uses the number to fill us in on her entire backstory, how she fits in (or, more to the point, doesn’t) in the town, how she has the same big dreams as her father, and how she’s been deeply, deeply hurt. This is the only time we LEARN about Louise. There are no lines spoken or songs sung that give us any of this information. You literally could not tell the story if this sequence were removed from the show, and it is so emotionally powerful that ballet companies all over the world perform parts of it (usually titled “Carousel Waltz”) – it has been most famously reinterpreted (but still inspired by Agnes DeMille) by Christopher Wheeldon for the New York City Ballet.
“Carousel” is an extraordinary show with problematic elements (but, truthfully, pretty much every show written during the Golden Age has problematic elements somewhere). I believe it codified the musical drama (as oppose to both musical comedy and Operetta) and that shows as varied as “Next to Normal” and “Hadestown” owe a debt to what was accomplished with this extraordinary show. Give it another look. What you find might surprise you.