"Carousel' at the Walnut (2nd review)

Theater without context:
Something's mssing from this Carousel

DAN ROTTENBERG

The opening scene of the Walnut Street Theatre’s revival of Carousel, according to the program, is set in “an amusement park on the New England coast in May,” but the year is not specified. The Walnut’s press release describes Carousel as a “tale of love and redemption,” a notion that presumably appeals to all theatergoers past and present. Our own critic Steve Cohen, elsewhere on this website, contends, “It still makes an emotional impact and is as relevant today as ever.”

I might agree. Yet the most relevant (to me, at least) aspect of Carousel seems to have been deliberately removed from this production. The original Broadway Carousel of 1945, based on a gloomy 1909 Central European tragedy by Ferenc Molnar, was not presented as some sort of timeless love story. It was set in a very specific time and place: New England in 1873, the dawn of the Gilded Age, when a few robber barons and mill owners made obscene fortunes and the masses of people on the bottom were trapped in lives of quiet desperation.

In this world, the rise of the great educated American middle class of the 20th Century is still decades in the future. Billy Bigelow the carnival barker and Julie Jordan the mill girl are trapped not only in their poverty but also in their inability even to articulate what’s on their minds or in their hearts. Like a veal calf destined for slaughter after three months, Billy clumsily grasps a few moments of love and pleasure, and then it’s lights out for eternity.

In the original, the material and emotional hardship of these lives is epitomized in the song “Stonecutters Cut It On Stone,” specifically the verse about a married woman’s daily regime sung by Julie’s friend, Carrie Pipperidge:

The clock just ticks your life away;
There’s no relief in sight.
It’s cookin’ an it’s scrubbin’
An’ it’s sewin’ all day,
An’ God knows what’n all night.

This was heavy stuff for the Broadway stage of 1945, and it represented a courageous act on Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s part. Most audiences didn’t know what to make of Carousel’s original production. It was one of the first tragic musicals ever staged; it followed Oklahoma!, Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s upbeat and wildly popular first collaboration of 1943; and it opened less than three weeks before V-E Day, when Americans were in a mood to celebrate. “I remember vaguely feeling that it wasn’t in the same league with Oklahoma!” my 90-year-old father, a longtime theater devotee, remarked when I asked him about it the other day.

To be sure, the first Carousel ran 890 performances and survived more than two years. But that was relatively weak beer for Rodgers and Hammerstein in the ‘40s: Oklahoma! and South Pacific both enjoyed runs that were more than twice that long. Of the five musicals generally recognized as Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s best (those three, plus The King and I and The Sound of Music), Carousel was the least successful by far.

Only with the passage of time and the growing sophistication of theater audiences has Carousel’s artful evocation of a painful moment in American civilization come to be appreciated. But not at the Walnut, apparently. That critical verse I cited above? It’s been deleted from this production.

I can’t help wondering whether the folks at the Walnut understand what this show is all about. I also can’t help wondering what’s next at the Walnut. Annie without the Great Depression? Fiddler On the Roof without the pogroms? West Side Story in the suburbs? Oh, the possibilities!



To read responses, click here.
To read Steve Cohen's review, click here.