by Jack Viertel
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.
The book was written by Abe Burrows (and cocredited to Jo Swerling, who wrote a first draft that was replaced). But some considerable credit is undoubtedly due to the director, George S. Kaufman, the master structuralist of American comedy. The plot shuttlecocks back and forth between two couples, Nathan Detroit and his fiancée of fourteen years, Miss Adelaide, and Sky Masterson and the Salvation Army lass he falls in love with, Sister Sarah Brown. The device that hinges this quartet together is a simple stroke of genius—a bet.
Nathan needs $1,000 to pay off a local garage owner so that he can hold his floating crap game in the garage. To get it, he bets Sky—who is addicted to crazy propositions—that Sky can’t take the religious crusader Sarah to Havana for dinner. If Sky loses, Nathan wins, of course. But it’s better than that. All Adelaide wants is to get married and Nathan to stop running the crap game. So if Nathan wins, Adelaide loses. And Sarah is just trying to keep the Save-a-Soul Mission and her reputation intact, so if Sky wins, she loses, and Adelaide wins. How, in this tipsy equation, can everyone ultimately come out on top? That’s the fun of Guys and Dolls. Structurally, the show kicks back and forth between the couples scene by scene, as each of their plots thickens the other, and ricochets closer to chaos. The stakes keep going up, as do the odds against the inevitable happy ending.
Sky and Nathan—in basic conflict, but not unfriendly—are each on a mission that drives the story forward. Adelaide and Sarah, who don’t meet each other until late in the first act, are left to figure out how to wrangle the two men they’ve wound up with. Good women, bad choices. It’s a traditional kind of comedy that asks an age-old comedy question: How much trouble can you get into in two and a half hours? And since it is written by men of the postwar era, you know that the women will ultimately get the upper hand. That’s the romantic joke of the ’50s: the men have all the power, but the women always win—they have all the brains. Shot through all this well-wrought anarchy is a tale of the inexorable pull of love. It turns out there is something bigger and better than a bet, even in Runyon’s world. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Guys and Dolls is a puzzle box that reveals one delight after another and is always heading toward multiple weddings.
The composer-lyricist Frank Loesser, a recent arrival from Hollywood, wrote the score, and no one has ever captured the voice of his source material better. Loesser’s lyrics are continually smart and colloquial without seeming educated, and funny without a trace of self-conscious wit. And his music sounds the way a good corned beef sandwich tastes. It’s irresistible, surprisingly complex, tangy, sweet, a little peppery, and whatever other adjectives you want to associate with corned beef, brown mustard, and seeded rye.
Nathan and Adelaide have been together for years, but Sky and Sarah meet for the first time in Act 1, Scene 2 (naturally), and, ill matched as they are, they’re going to sing about it.
She’s in a foul mood, having scoured Broadway for sinners willing to convert—and come up empty. He’s surprisingly upbeat. He has to enter a place he normally wouldn’t be caught dead in and convince a chilly religious volunteer he’s never met to get in an airplane and go to Cuba with him, and there’s a part of him that enjoys the challenge. He dives in, pretending to be a sinner who has seen the light. She sees through this pose in about a minute, of course, and tries to kick him out. He’s not going anywhere, though, not when $1,000 and his pride are at stake. And a pure stroke of luck—an inaccurately attributed quote from the Bible that is hanging on the wall—saves his bacon. Strangely, for a self-described gambler and sinner, Sky knows his religious verses. And Sarah is just the tiniest bit intrigued.
“There’s two things been in every hotel room in the country,” he explains. “Sky Masterson and the Gideon Bible. I must have read the Good Book ten or twelve times. I once won 5 G’s on a triple parlay—Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego.”
This is not what Sarah is used to hearing, and it buys him another couple of minutes, but things deteriorate quickly. He offers to guarantee her a dozen sinners at her midnight prayer meeting, which will prove to be an important part of the plot later on, but she turns him down flat. He accuses her of hating men; she denies it vigorously. He alters the accusation: maybe she just hates him. She won’t even agree to that. But the man who might appeal to her, she admits, will never, ever, be a gambler.
This piece of information is like a trip wire and does to Sky what his correction of the Bible verse did to Sarah. He’s suddenly challenged and awake to the woman in the room.
“I am not interested in what he will not be,” he says. “I am interested in what he will be.”
And Sarah, who, if she genuinely didn’t care, would just tell him it’s none of his business, instead takes the time to paint a portrait—of the anti-Sky:
I’ve imagined every bit of him
From his strong moral fiber
To the wisdom in his head
To the homey aroma of his pipe.
Sky’s having none of it:
You have wished yourself a
Scarsdale Galahad,
The breakfast-eating,
Brooks Brothers type.
She doesn’t even hear the sarcasm. “I’ll know,” she sings, “when my love comes along.”
The irony, of course, is that he’s just walked in the door. And she doesn’t know. But she keeps singing, and so does Sky, even though she asks him not to. “Mine, I’ll leave to chance and chemistry,” he asserts. She’s baffled by his use of the word “chemistry,” but he stands by it. Sex plays a big part, he implies, and in this song it does. It’s all about chemistry—it certainly has nothing to do with what they’re saying to each other.
The form of these conditional love songs is fairly consistent, and it plays on the subconscious of the audience in a way that is structural and subtextual. First one sings and then the other sings a rebuttal, but both assertion and response have the same melody. So there’s something that tells us, subliminally, that these two have more in common than they think they do—they have the same music. At the end, for a moment, at least, the two actually sing together, in simple harmony. And when a couple sings in harmony, the groundwork for eventual emotional harmony is laid, so to speak. In the case of “I’ll Know,” Sky and Sarah sing one line together, “I’ll know when my love comes along,” but it sounds so right that at the end of it, he kisses her. She kind of kisses back. Then she slaps him. The acting challenge of the song is to transcend the words, which are an argument, and somehow move inexorably toward the kiss, and the slap, which land things in an emotional mess—just the kind we like in these stories.