Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel

by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II (Libretto), Ferenc Molnár (Original author)

In a Maine coastal village toward the end of the 19th century, the swaggering, carefree carnival barker, Billy Bigelow, captivates and marries the gentle millworker, Julie Jordan. Billy loses his job just as he learns that Julie is pregnant and, desperately intent upon providing a decent life for his family, he is coerced into being an accomplice to a robbery. Caught in the act and facing the certainty of prison, he takes his own life and is sent 'up there.' Billy is allowed to return to earth for one day fifteen years later, and he encounters the daughter he never knew. She is a lonely, friendless teenager, her father's reputation as a thief and bully having haunted her throughout her young life. How Billy instills in both the child and her mother a sense of hope and dignity is a dramatic testimony to the power of love.

136 pages, Paperback

Published October 27, 2021

About the author

Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 – December 30, 1979) was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater.

With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the best-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.

Richard Rodgers was in the inaugural group of Kennedy Center Honorees in 1978 for lifetime achievement in the arts.
In 1990, the 46th Street Theatre was renamed the Richard Rodgers Theatre in his memory.

Reviews

[Eva B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was admittedly under the misconception that Carousel was essentially It’s A Wonderful Life if George Bailey was a horrible person—I assumed that Billy died before the end of the first act and the second half was him seeing the impact of his actions on everyone else—but it wasn’t quite that. Instead the postmortem bit is a scene or two where he sees his daughter once she’s in her teens and wants to lead her on a better path, but since it’s only a short bit of the overall script, it’s not as compelling as it could be. All that being said, I have historically not had the best track record when it comes to enjoying Rodgers and Hammerstein shows so maybe it’s just on me.
Side note: Carousel is well-known for its depiction of domestic abuse and how it uh. hasn’t aged the best, to put it lightly. I think that one specific critique is overblown, as the line often paraphrased as “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” was from Louise about Billy and in the context of him smacking her hand away while visiting from the afterlife and not Julie about Billy hitting her, but since Julie goes on to say that, paraphrasing again, it’s possible for someone you love to hit you and for you to not feel any pain at all, the bit of relief I had at the other line being misattributed was short-lived. Personally I think Carousel has the bones to be a good story about abuse—the way that sometimes it’s hard to see an abuser as a bad person and their abuse as wrong if you love them, how it’s a cycle, how there’s different types (Enoch may not hit Carrie, but he’s incredibly controlling of her), and how far the line is before someone can be redeemed, but given the pacing of the show it misses the mark.

[Greg Kerestan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Institutional politics at my high school prevented me from performing as "First Fisherman" in "Carousel" back in 2006. However, I still appreciated the play for what it is, despite my bad experience with it. Rodgers and Hammerstein create an effective antihero in Billy Bigelow, who wants to be a good man but very much isn't. The central problem of the work is that it waffles between depicting Julie, Billy's long-suffering wife, as having a sort of Stockholm Syndrome for putting up with his physical and emotional abuse, and being a model wife who deals with a difficult husband as is "a woman's lot" in the show's time period. It's hard to make a wife-beating hoodlum and deadbeat dad a sympathetic character, but R&H come as close as anyone possibly can.