How Rodgers and Hammerstein moved a Budapest tragedy to the Maine coast
After Oklahoma!, the film mogul Samuel Goldwyn joked that Richard Rodgers might as well give up, since he would never top it. Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein answered with Carousel, a darker story about a carnival barker and a mill girl that Rodgers came to call his favourite of all his musicals.
The source was Liliom, a 1909 play by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár that puzzled its first Budapest audiences and closed after thirty-odd nights, only to become a hit after the First World War. Molnár guarded it jealously. He turned down Puccini, wanting the story remembered as his own, and later refused Kurt Weill. When the Theatre Guild first pitched it over one of their weekly lunches, both writers said no: they felt nothing for Budapest and thought the bleak ending wrong for a musical. A proposal to move it to Louisiana foundered on the thought of writing lyrics in stage Creole dialect.
Rodgers, who owned a house in Connecticut, finally suggested New England. Hammerstein pictured sailors, whalers, mill girls and clambakes, lusty people rather than the thin-lipped puritans of stage cliché. Molnár, taken to see Oklahoma!, agreed to let them try, and the Guild secured the rights in October 1943, the playwright getting one percent of the gross plus 2,500 dollars. The pair insisted on freedom to change the plot, a point Hammerstein said made the show possible.
In the result, barker Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan lose their jobs over their romance, and Billy joins a robbery to support their coming child; when it fails, he is granted a chance to make amends. A long sung scene, Soliloquy, grew from a trick Rodgers had used with Lorenz Hart in Pal Joey, a song a character sings to himself; in it Billy dreams of a son, then realises the baby could be a girl. The score also includes If I Loved You and You'll Never Walk Alone.
Opening on Broadway on April 19, 1945, Carousel ran for 890 performances, reached the West End in 1950 and became a film in 1956. Time magazine named it the best musical of the 20th century in 1999.
Source: Carousel (musical)
