"TAKE ME BEYOND THE PEARLY GATES"
Imprisonment, Escape and the Heavenly Beyond in the Work
of Rodgers and Hammerstein

By Katie McGeer
Literary Resident

When Billy Bigelow reaches the back gates of heaven in the second act of Carousel, he brashly proclaims his eagerness to confront "the highest judge of all" - to accept the punishment for his "good big sins" and be free of the agonizing inability to support his pregnant wife and unborn child.

But escape is more difficult than Billy anticipated. "You haven't done enough good in your life to get in here," the Starkeeper tells him and sends him back to earth to alleviate some of the trouble he caused.

Billy's heavenly encounter contrasts with the rest of the play's gloomier earthly setting: a newly-industrialized New England village among the working-class mill operatives and fisherman for whom unemployment, drinking, theft and abuse are the harsh realities of life.

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, such dark realism was uncharted territory for a musical. Over the course of their partnership in the 1940s and '50s, Rodgers and Hammerstein deliberately broke away from the notion of musical theater as escapism, and did so at a time when audiences had a lot to escape - from the Depression, through World War II and the Korean War, to the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Rejecting escapism, all of Rodgers and Hammerstein's major collaborations nonetheless do deal with acts of escape - literal or metaphorical, geographical or psychological.

The first moments of their first collaboration present an escape of sorts. As the curtain rises in Oklahoma! (1943), a solitary Curly enters in a moment of personal paradise singing "Oh What a Beautiful Morning."

Yet as Oklahoma! unfolds, Curly's paradise is lost to unrequited love, territorial dispute, and even a stabbing. Initially perceived as a place where "everything's going my way," Oklahoma is ultimately described by its inhabitants as a place that controls them: "We know we belong to the land," the chorus announces in the show's final titular number.

Oklahoma transforms from Curly's idyllic escape to the place he is escaping from; the play ends with Curly and Laurey's departure from Oklahoma - albeit temporary - on their honeymoon.

Like Oklahoma!, Carousel (1945) also begins with an escape as Julie, evading the rigidity of boarding house rules, visits the amusement park after a long day at the textile mill. And like Curly's, Julie's haven is quickly destroyed: her encounter with Billy costs both of them their jobs, distressing their domestic life together from the beginning.

A second escape is seen later, in Billy's death and journey to heaven. Neither heaven nor the amusement park turns out to provide the solution Billy or Julie hoped for, and Billy and Julie's daughter Louise grows up facing the same problems her parents did.

Yet the attempted escapes haven't been completely futile. Escape brought the couple together in the first place, and their love for one another prevents them from being completely separated by Billy's death.

As Nettie suggests to Julie in "You'll Never Walk Alone," the hope of eventual escape - of "a golden sky" at the end of every storm - can provide us with the strength to endure difficult times.

Such hope is fostered in South Pacific (1949) by the American soldiers, sequestered and bored on a Pacific Island during the Second World War. The soldiers find a figurative outlet through their Thanksgiving Follies and a literal getaway on the mysterious island of Bali Ha'i.

With Bali Ha'i, Rodgers and Hammerstein develop more fully a concept of escape as an individualized phenomenon. Curly's solitary paradise in "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning," and Julie's internal sanctuary in "You'll Never Walk Alone," might both be summed up by Bali Ha'i's enticing whisper: "Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me!"

The individualized nature of escape is further highlighted by the contrast between the soldiers and Emile de Becque: the island life from which the soldiers try to escape is the very refuge that Emile sought in order to escape his past life in France.

Indeed, everyone in South Pacific seems to be escaped or escaping; as Emile answers when Nellie asks him about his past, "Who is not running away from something? There are fugitives everywhere."

Just as escape is defined by the individual in need of it, Nellie, Emile and the soldiers also demonstrate how imprisonment can differ with the individual inside.

In addition to geographical imprisonment, South Pacific also poses a scenario of ideological imprisonment. For both Nellie and Lt. Cable, racial prejudices raise a barrier to love. While Cable believes his romance with a young Polynesian girl to be incompatible with his life back home, Nellie overcomes her bigotry and embraces Emile's half-Polynesian children as her own.

As Cable himself acknowledges in "You've got to be carefully taught," racism is not an inherent, universal outlook, but one that is "drummed in your dear little ear" at an early age.

This exploration of imprisonment carries over into The King and I (1951), which probes more deeply how we draw our boundaries and define the limitations of our worlds.

British widow Anna Leonowens explains to the princes of Siam that their map of the world is geographically disproportionate. On a smaller scale, Anna and the King argue over whether she will reside inside or outside the palace walls.

Imprisonment is also seen through the enslavement of women in the King's court, as well as through Tuptim's staging of Uncle Tom's Cabin. While the escaping slave succeeds in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tuptim's own escape is unsuccessful. Yet the attempted escape still has an impact on the King, who finds himself unable to beat Tuptim when she is apprehended.

If The King and I (which opened, notably, while the US was at war in East Asia) offers a less promising view of escape from our political, cultural and sexual confinements, The Sound of Music (1959), Rodgers and Hammerstein's final collaboration, certainly makes the promise anew.

The Sound of Music contains a series of escapes, from Maria's opening flight from her abbey to the Alps, to Liesl's late-night rendezvous with Rolf, to the children's illicit field trips with their new governess, to the family's final escape to Switzerland.

Unlike the escapes in much of Rodgers and Hammerstein's prior work, those in The Sound of Music are largely successful. But none is without serious consequences: though we don't see what happens after the von Trapp family leaves Austria as the Nazi regime ascends, audiences in 1959 would have known too well the horrors of the war that was about to ensue - which was, significantly, the war that was beginning when Rodgers and Hammerstein commenced their collaboration.

Audiences would also have recognized the ongoing attempts to escape oppressive regimes that continued during the Cold War.

There is no perfect pattern to the escapes depicted in Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals. Some, like the escape of the von Trapps, are more successful, while others, like Billy Bigelow's, are incomplete.

The lack of a consistent pattern highlights the individualized nature of each escape, as well as the specific relationship it has to the circumstances in which it is attempted.

This relationship is perhaps best summed up in Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1957 television musical Cinderella. Reflecting on life in her stepmother's house, Cinderella sings,

In my own little corner, in my own little chair,
I can be whatever I want to be.
On the wings of my fancy I can fly anywhere
And the world will open its arms to me.

When escape is most successful - as Cinderella's proves to be - it is a tool, a coping mechanism for enduring a difficult time; it is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Death doesn't solve Billy's problems, but his encounter with heaven allows him a second opportunity to fix them. Escape serves to integrate, rather than separate, the heavenly freedom a character seeks with the harsh reality that imprisons him or her.

Musically speaking, integration was how Rodgers and Hammerstein redefined their genre of theater - by incorporating song into the telling of a story, rather than tacking it on for entertainment.

By telling stories of escape, Rodgers and Hammerstein were likewise able to integrate a theatrical world of song, dance and romance with a real world of serious issues.

Escape isn't a way out for Rodgers and Hammerstein's characters, or for the 1940s and '50s audiences who came to their musicals expecting heaven and happy endings.

But for characters and audiences alike, the promise of escape - the possibilities for a better place, a heavenly vision of what lies ahead - is a valuable, even beautiful way of getting through the harsh realities of the present world around us.