The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built (13 page)

Carousel
goes in and out of favor as its sexual politics are continually put on trial by audiences and critics—it’s about a man who loves his wife and strikes her, and a wife who doesn’t want to and won’t leave. But the magnitude of its achievement tends to overwhelm the objections. Based on the play
Liliom
by Ferenc Molnár, it treats the fatality of love, as two quietly desperate people choose the freedom of romantic passion over the prison of everyday drudgery, and pay an awful price. Julie Jordan, its heroine, is a naïve millworker, destined to live out her life at the weaving loom in a bleak and gloomy factory, surviving on a menial’s wages. Billy Bigelow is a young tough making his scant living as a carousel barker at a traveling carnival. Neither has much of a future, unless they take it into their own hands.

As previously noted,
Carousel
begins with a dance prelude (Scene 1) that reveals both the straitened circumstances and the petty pleasures of a life defined by rural poverty and routine. There’s nothing romantic, or even hopeful, about Julie’s existence. The carnival is the best she can expect, and it’s a tawdry thing. “Carousel Waltz” is a beautiful piece of music, and the ballet that accompanies it can be dazzlingly good theater—but the world it depicts is a sad one, bereft of real hope. The magnificence of the wooden horses on Billy’s carousel promises something noble, romantic, and grand, but it seems impossibly far off from the daily life of this hidebound Maine fishing village.

After the waltz, Julie and her friend Carrie are discovered running from the woman who owns the carousel through a corner of the local park, which contains nothing but a bench. The scene begins in action and peril, and the stakes just keep going up. To be fair, considerable credit is due to Molnár, whose play, ironically, is said to have been translated into English by Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers’s first lyric-writing partner. (Hart was an employee of Benjamin Glazer, who got credit for the translation, according to Hart’s biographer Gary Marmorstein.)

Hammerstein shortened the scene by almost half, and while the structure remains the same, the intensity is expertly ratcheted up. From the very first line, there is an argument going on, and the scene is a series of engaging, quickly shifting, and escalating disputes, which result in two lives being changed forever. It begins with the carousel’s owner, Mrs. Mullen, hurling accusations at Julie about her behavior on the carousel. Julie, whom we don’t really know much about, has been “taking liberties” with Mrs. Mullen’s barker, according to Mrs. Mullen. This Julie hotly denies, in a manner that suggests she’s not easily cowed. Soon Billy arrives, and it develops that Mrs. Mullen may only be suffering from a bad case of jealousy. But she may not be entirely wrong, either. Julie has seen something she wants, and she’s not about to back away—from Mrs. Mullen or anything else that might stand in her way. She doesn’t completely understand her own behavior, but something is driving her. She fights off the accusations, and she fights off Mrs. Mullen, and while we’re not sure what it is that she’s after, we do know, in that classic musical theater sense, that she’s the one to watch. She’s “
quieter and deeper than a well
,” her friend Carrie sings, but not at the moment. In some way she’s unknowable, and unrevealing, but there’s something inside her struggling to get out. She’s the one who is battling the hand she’s been dealt, not wisely, perhaps, but with an unquenchable thirst and the determination that goes with it.

Once Mrs. Mullen has been dispatched by Billy (she fires him in the process), Billy goes to get his gear from the carousel, and Julie and Carrie are left alone. Carrie confesses that she’s found the man of her dreams—an industrious herring fisherman named Mr. Snow—and wants to know whether Julie feels similarly about Billy. Julie can’t say. She just doesn’t know what’s happening to her, as a young but strong-willed mill girl might very well not. But we do. And when Billy returns and Carrie goes off, leaving the two of them alone, we see it start to unfold, as Hammerstein wrote in an earlier lyric, like “passion’s flower unfurled.”

Billy is a risk, but Julie appears to have little to lose. Yet the risk keeps getting bigger and worse. In the course of a few moments, we learn that Julie will lose her job if she stays another minute with Billy. She’ll be locked out. She’s even offered a lifeline: a ride back to her mill dormitory by the mill’s owner, who appears serendipitously, but she turns it down and—like Billy—is fired. Now she has nothing. She learns from a passing policeman that Billy has a reputation for betraying young girls, that he’s up from Coney Island, in the reckless precincts of New York. She doesn’t care. Billy can’t rob her—she has no money. Each black mark against Billy seems to cause her to get closer to him, not further away. As the stakes for her future go up, she becomes more and more determined to ignore them. She wants to stay—that’s all. And once alone with Billy, she can’t really say why.

Hammerstein’s dialogue proceeds in a grebe-like fashion. Billy and Julie work their way toward the subjects of love and marriage through contradiction and defiance. Neither of them knows anything about either subject—but they can’t stop talking about them. Finally Julie explains, “Y’see, I’m never goin’ to marry,” which turns out to be a challenge to Billy that he wasn’t expecting.

“Suppose I was to say to you that I’d marry you…,” he says, not knowing where the thought has come from. “But you wouldn’t marry anyone like me, would you?”

At this point, the die is cast, but neither of them can even begin to admit it. Instead, they sing, and their song is woven through dialogue—a musical scene, really, more than a conventional duet. They leave their fantasies of life with the other in the conditional tense. But nature is working against them. The lyric of “If I Loved You” is almost entirely about fear—fear of confusion, of an inability to communicate love, of a tragic ending. All these fears will be justified by the events to follow, yet something about the scene suggests, counterintuitively, that it will all be worth it anyhow.

Why? Because the blossoms of the trees are beginning to cascade down on them. “The wind brings them down,” Julie says distractedly. But Billy points out that there isn’t really any wind. And suddenly we’ve slipped into a dreamlike space, supported by Rodgers’s stately but trance-inducing music, which perhaps justifies Billy’s next lyric, an unexpectedly philosophical and poetic one, especially coming from the mouth of an uneducated carny. “Ain’t much wind tonight. Hardly any,” he begins, speaking, and then sings:

You can’t hear a sound, not the turn of a leaf

Nor the fall of a wave, hittin’ the sand.

The tide’s creepin’ up on the beach like a thief

Afraid to be caught stealin’ the land.

On a night like this I start to wonder what life

Is all about.

Julie does her best to bring the conversation back to the normal realm of things, but Billy has a point to make, and he makes it:

There’s a helluva lot o’ stars in the sky

And the sky’s so big the sea looks small

And two little people—

You and I—

We don’t count at all.

By this point he, and the magic of the evening, have somehow won Julie over, and she contributes two simple lines—she’s moving toward what she always wanted anyhow, but it’s still a leap. If she’s going to contribute to Billy’s melody and his philosophy, the mating dance is nearly done:

There’s a feathry little cloud floatin’ by

Like a lonely leaf on a big blue stream

Billy answers her:

And two little people—you and I—

Who cares what we dream?

These aren’t the famous lyrics in “If I Loved You”—popular versions of the song eliminate this slightly supernatural interlude—but they are, in some ways, the most important ones: they carry the “two little people” beneath a sky that’s bigger than a sea into the realm of myth and fate, and bond them.

The well-known lines of the lyric are all about how they would want to treat each other
if
they were in love—with tenderness and reassurance. But they wouldn’t be able to do it. They’d let all their “golden chances” get away. And in fact, by grand design of the authors, that’s what happens. It takes the whole course of the play for either of them to be able to say the words “I love you” to the other. By the time Julie says it, Billy is dead. By the time Billy says it, fifteen years have gone by and he’s a ghost. They have, indeed, let their golden chances pass them by, and by that time there’s no turning back. But here, in their initial meeting, they can’t stop the primal pull, no matter how much they intuit their future failures. The interlude confronts the fact that they can’t stop themselves—they’re going to be together anyhow because they are a part of something bigger: the magnetic force that pulls people together. As a result, at least there will be a moment of passion in what are otherwise empty lives without prospects. What will happen to them now is not really in their own hands anymore; a scene that started out with a noisy but petty squabble has become somehow an examination of the universal state of falling in love. And Billy has joined the little army of American leading men who are frustratingly inarticulate in the cold light of day but who have poetry locked in them, which, in rare and unexpected moments, finds its voice under the stars.

It’s a poetry that cannot be allowed to flower for long, however, or Billy would risk no longer being masculine under the definition by which he lives.

“I’m not a feller to marry anybody,” he reassures Julie after singing about the likely unhappy ending of any such adventure. She pulls back with him, almost to a comfort zone.

“Don’t worry about it, Billy,” she says. But she’s used his name—for the first time.

And just as they seem perhaps to have reached dry land, nature intervenes, in the form of those persistent blossoms, which once again begin to flutter to the ground all around them.

“You’re right about there bein’ no wind,” Julie says. “The blossoms are just comin’ down by theirselves. Jest their time to, I reckon.”

And with that, the conspiracy is complete. Julie and Billy kiss, as we now know they were always destined to do, the music swells, and the next time we see them, they’ll be married.

*   *   *

Hammerstein (sourcing Molnár and improving the source) has held off the kiss for about twelve minutes. The scene has a slow natural tempo, but it is pulled as tight as a high-tension wire. What the writing achieves is a sense that this romance isn’t domestic, isn’t upper or lower class, isn’t constrained in any way at all. It’s bigger than all of that. Billy’s claim that their lives don’t matter at all is both the ultimate truth and the ultimate fiction. Their courtship is the essence of human need—it’s what drives the whole species. It gives
Carousel
size and stature.

This is part of why musicals endure. Their mythmaking continues to speak to us. And for that to happen, they have to communicate human experience in some way that tells. The bench scene is justly celebrated along Broadway because it does that—and no single scene has ever done it better.

*   *   *

Hammerstein wasn’t the first person ever to write a conditional love song, of course—they exist in American operettas and in European operas that were written before there was any American musical theater. And no doubt they cross cultures because, as Cole Porter pointed out in one of the most primal and least weighty of them, “Birds, do it, bees do it” … and all the rest of us, too. But it was Hammerstein who became a master of these initial moments of human anxiety and desire, who took them seriously and transformed them from light entertainment into something deeper and better, beginning with the somewhat primitive “Make Believe” from
Show Boat
, and including “People Will Say We’re in Love” from
Oklahoma!
, “If I Loved You” and its bench scene, and the “Twin Soliloquies” from
South Pacific
, an innovation driven by, of all things, performance anxiety.

Sometimes the contract is the mother of invention. In the case of
South Pacific
, Mary Martin, playing the army nurse Nellie Forbush, was cast opposite the famed opera basso Ezio Pinza, as a European planter named Emile de Becque, who lives on an island, literally and figuratively. Martin could put across a Broadway song as well as or better than anyone, but she knew that she couldn’t outsing Pinza. She had it written into her contract that she and Pinza would never be asked to sing simultaneously, which created an interesting challenge for R&H as they approached the conditional love song moment. They solved it inventively with the “Twin Soliloquies,” a matched pair of musical moments in which Martin and Pinza sing privately of their desire for the other, of how life might change for the better if they were together, and how unlikely it is that it will come to pass. Each has a few lines of hope, a few lines of crippling self-doubt, and a cautious prayer for a chance to make it work—but they never actually communicate, except with the audience. Then, as their uncertain first date reaches an impasse, de Becque sings “Some Enchanted Evening,” which gives Nellie an awful lot to think about. It’s a conditional love song as solo.

*   *   *

Conditional love songs, like opening numbers, come chiefly in two varieties. There are the ones like “If I Loved You,” full of uncertainty but powered by desire and hope. And there are the others, expressions of pure hostility but powered by desire and hope. If Hammerstein was the master of the first variety, no one ever did the second better than Frank Loesser, in “I’ll Know” from
Guys and Dolls
.

*   *   *

Carousel
is a dark-hued musical drama in which reluctant lovers trust themselves to fate.
Guys and Dolls
, on the other hand, is a brightly painted war-between-the-sexes comedy. The milieus could not be more different, although both shows begin with ballets.
Carousel
transports playgoers to a rugged rural seaside village, while
Guys and Dolls
leaves them right where they got their tickets torn—in Times Square. But it shows them the underbelly of the theater district they might never have imagined—cockeyed, unpredictably comic, and charmingly disreputable. Based on a handful of Damon Runyon’s popular short stories of the ’30s and ’40s, the show focuses on two couples seen through the prism of Runyon’s gaudy take on the horseplayers, gamblers, chorus cuties, and tough guys who populated Broadway (I mean the street itself) back in its heyday. In some ways, it’s a tossed salad of sketches, specialty material, ballads, and production numbers—a throwback to the Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart musicals of the ’30s. Yet despite this, and unlike any of those early shows, it is also a perfectly structured tale in which every action by one character or couple triggers a reaction from the other—and the plot can’t be worked out until the consequences are totaled up and paid for.