Example 9.4. “Soliloquy” and “The Carousel Waltz” (fifth waltz)
(a) “Soliloquy”
(b) “The Carousel Waltz” (fifth waltz)
In Carousel, many musical details, including the subtle reuse and transformation of rhythms that correspond to musical characters previously noted, frequently support dramatic details and generate dramatic themes. Some of these details serve more a musical than a dramatic purpose in their integration of disparate sections. For example, the parallelisms between the musical phrases that Carrie uses to describe Julie (“You are quieter and deeper than a well”) and Mr. Snow (“He comes home ev’ry night in his round-bottomed boat”) in the opening scene might be considered a musically meaningful but dramatically irrelevant unifying detail.
On the other hand, the primary accompaniment of “If I Loved You,” in which three arpeggiated eighth notes follow an eighth rest, foreshadows the less breathless collection of four arpeggiated eighth notes that mark the first half of most measures of “Two Little People” (a melody which also not incidentally exhibits several prominent quarter-note triplets).22 The musical link between the accompaniments of “If I Loved You” and “Two Little People” (Example 9.5a and b) shows up more clearly in the holograph manuscript on deposit at the Library of Congress, where the two songs share the key of C major.23 Even those who refuse to see the accompaniment of “If I Loved You” as a foreshadowing of the accompaniment to “Two Little People” might acknowledge its connection with “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (Example 9.5c). In this song the arpeggiated eighth-note figure is now continuous, not only for an entire measure but for nearly the entire song (Rodgers breaks the pattern in the final four measures). “If I Loved You” and “Two Little People” demonstrate the unity between Billy and Julie; “You’ll Never Walk Alone” signifies musically as well as dramatically that neither of these star-crossed lovers will walk alone as long as Julie carries Billy in her memory.24
Example 9.5. Arpeggiated accompaniments
(a) “If I Loved You”
(b) “Two Little People”
(c) “You‘ll Never Walk Alone”
Rodgers and Hammerstein also manage to convey a musical correspondence that matches the dramatic contrasts between two pairs of contrasting romantic leads (de rigueur in musicals for the next twenty years): Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan on one end of the spectrum, Enoch Snow and Carrie Pipperidge on the other. In stark contrast to Billy (a baritone), Enoch (a tenor) is a man who plans ahead, whether he is building a fleet of herring boats or a fleet of children. With his irritating, self-satisfied laugh Enoch is reminiscent of Laurey’s silly rival Gertie in Oklahoma! and embodies the negative as well as the positive consequences of conventionality and practicality.
When he gives Carrie flowers, Enoch, the builder and planner, gives her a package of geranium seeds to plant rather than the beautiful but ephemeral real thing. And when he tells Julie that he likes to “plant and take keer” of flowers, Julie replies that Billy “likes t’ smell ‘em,” an impractical romantic trait that endeared the carousel barker to her in their first scene together. By the latter part of act II, Enoch has metamorphosed from an overbearing but essentially likable hard-working man with lofty plans for his sardine business and his family to an insufferable, condescending, and genuinely unsympathetic character. Unfortunately, his fleet of children are created in his image. Further, in opposition to Carrie’s open appreciation for the less savory entertainments witnessed on their trip to New York, the pure-as-snow Enoch (the name is also uncomfortably close to eunuch) suggests that she discuss the Shakespeare play instead. Enoch’s surreptitious visit to the burlesque house (where he runs into Carrie) adds hypocrisy to a growing list of negative characteristics, even if this action allows him a human vice that audiences might relate to.
In an age increasingly and justifiably less tolerant of wife-beating in any form and for any reason, Billy might be considered a much less wonderful guy than he was in 1945 (certainly than 1873), even if Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Billy is less abrasive than Molnár’s Liliom. Although his predilection for violence is indefensible—to satisfy his fragile ego he hits Julie because she is on the right side of their arguments—it is significant as part of the fantasy that his blows do not hurt either Julie or later Louise. In fact, when he slaps his daughter it feels like a kiss.
Without condoning Billy’s actions Hammerstein seems to be telling us that other forms of abuse might take an even 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.
Hytn
er’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 why she feels the way she does, I deliberately ended the phrase [“I’m as jumpy as a puppet on a string”] on the uncertain sound of the F natural (on the word ‘string’) rather than on the more positive F sharp.”31
Rodgers left it up to others to demonstrate how the musical details in Carousel support the lyrics and the libretto and create musical unity, and how such details create subtle correspondences between music, character, and drama. Nevertheless, his description of “musical dialogue” in Love Me Tonight and his analysis of his text-setting objectives in “It Might as Well Be Spring” reveal that Rodgers was fully conscious of how nuances can help a theater composer to achieve an artistic goal. In the light of his autobiography, a discussion of how dotted rhythms, triplets, and arpeggiated accompanimental figures reveal greater dramatic truths appears to be grounded in reality.32 Rodgers is the first to admit that a number of his musicals created with Hart do not even aspire to, much less achieve, the goals he first enunciated in the late 1920s with Dearest Enemy and Peggy-Ann. His primary desire throughout his extraordinary career, however, was to create a musical theater in which the songs belong to their characters and determine their place within the dramatic action, and a musical theater in which dialogue, song, and dance are unified and integrated. These ideals did not suddenly appear with Oklahoma! and Carousel. After developing his vision and evolving technique as a dramatic composer with Hart, Rodgers found a collaborator who fully embraced the integrated ideal. Together, Rodgers and Hammerstein were a winning combination that forged a living and posthumous legacy of popular commercial works and a critical stature unmatched by any other body of work in the history of the American musical.
After the death of his second collaborator, Rodgers, who had by necessity ghost-written lyrics for Hart, decided to write his own lyrics for an entire show. The result, the biracial romance No Strings (1962) with Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley in the principal roles, turned out to be Rodgers’s final success (580 performances), albeit a modest one by the standards of Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. His next show, collaboration with Hammerstein’s lyricist protégé Stephen Sondheim, produced the disappointing, if underrated, Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965 (220 performances).
Rodgers remained active to the end. In the 1970s he managed to mount three final shows on Broadway: Two by Two (1970), with lyrics by Martin Charnin and starring Danny Kaye as Noah (343 performances); Rex (1976), with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and starring Nicol Williamson as Henry VIII (49 performances); and I Remember Mama (1979), with lyrics by Charnin and Raymond Jessel and starring Liv Ullmann and George Hearn (108 performances).33 Less than four months after his fortieth and final musical closed, Rodgers died on December 30, 1979.
Because they float at the center of the mainstream, the convention-shattering features of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s adaptations of literary sources with their carefully constructed subplots (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I) seem less apparent than their more experimental and less successful works with original books. Among the latter are Allegro (1947), with its Greek chorus and abstract sets, and the back stager Me and Juliet (1953), in which audiences could see on- and offstage events simultaneously.34 Just as it is often difficult for present-day listeners to appreciate the iconoclasm of the less noisy modernists (for example, the revolutionary Debussy), it requires a special effort in the post-Sondheim and Lloyd Webber era to understand just how unconventional and innovative Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals really were. Here is a glimpse of what was innovative (if not unprecedentedly new) in three of their shows, a body of work which helped to establish future conventions:
OKLAHOMA! (1943) eschews the usual opening chorus (or singer accompanied by an orchestra) and instead opens with a woman churning butter alone onstage and the hero singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” (without even a piano to back him up) offstage. It also presents perhaps the first genuine, albeit pathetic, villain who dies in a struggle with a hero, and its full-length dream ballet moves several steps beyond On Your Toes in its integration of dance into the plot.
SOUTH PACIFIC (1949) offers the first major middle-aged romantic hero played by the first major defector from the Metropolitan Opera (Ezio Pinza). The younger romantic secondary male character dies, and the central romantic leads sing “Twin Soliloquies” to themselves “silently.” The drama is conveyed through rapid and seamless scene shifts, and, most provocatively, the musical seriously explores the causes of racial prejudice in the song “Carefully Taught.”
THE KING AND I (1951), based at least loosely on a true story and real people, is the first major musical in which the characters (if not the cast) are mostly Asian, a foreign language is conveyed by instruments rather than by speech, the principals never kiss and touch only once, when they are dancing, and the central male character dies at the end (and, unlike Billy Bigelow, stays dead).
Carousel (1945) was no less daring. It revolves around an unsympathetic character (when he is not singing) who hits his wife, sings a “Soliloquy” for nearly eight minutes before attempting a robbery, dies by suicide, and hits his daughter when he returns to earth (from purgatory) fifteen years later. Musicals of various types after Oklahoma! and Carousel would continue to be remembered by their songs, of course, but from now on their revivability would usually depend on integrated and more coherent books. Although by no means did they invent the so-called integrated Broadway musical (often referred to as the “sung play”), or even always adhere to the elusive integrated ideal, more than anyone else Rodgers and Hammerstein can be praised (or blamed) for demonstrating in their optimistic, homespun, and sentimental shows the commercial potential of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
CHAPTER TEN
KISS ME, KATE
The Taming of Cole Porter
Two Tough Acts to Follow
Act I: Rodgers and Hammerstein
In the years foll
owing the success of Anything Goes in 1934 only Rodgers and Hart surpassed Porter in producing musical hits on Broadway. The Gershwins were unable to complete any more Broadway shows between Porgy and Bess in 1935 and George’s death two years later, and Kern managed only one more new Broadway show, Very Warm for May (1939) in a final decade spent mainly in films. As Gershwin and Kern ebbed, Porter flowed for the remaining years of the 1930s with one successful (albeit now nearly forgotten) musical after another filled with unforgettable songs: “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things” from Jubilee (1935); “It’s De-Lovely” from Red, Hot and Blue! (1936); “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from Leave It to Me (1938); “Well, Did You Evah!” and “Friendship” from DuBarry Was a Lady (1939).
In the mid-1940s, however, two successive failures, Seven Lively Arts (1944) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1946), prompted Porter and his backers to question the commercial vitality of the pre–Rodgers and Hammerstein–type musical. Earlier in 1944 Porter had produced his sixth successive old-fashioned Broadway hit, Mexican Hayride. But the tides had turned, and the examples of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s second musical, Carousel (1945), Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Porter’s own Kiss Me, Kate (1948) bear testimony to the power that Oklahoma! now exerted. Even these two old dog songwriters now felt the urgency of learning the new trick of writing integrated musicals.
Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Page 28