SPINNING THROUGH TIME
A Carousel Production History

After the wild success of their first collaboration on Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein began preparations for Carousel, the second installment in their epic 16-show canon.

Now without fundraising constraints or a reputation to nurture, the duo set out to create a musical adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's play Liliom. This adaptation would be armed with the same director (Rouben Mamoulian) and choreographer (Agnes de Mille) as Oklahoma!.

In March 1945, after a year of planning, writing and workshopping, Carousel began out-of-town tryouts in New Haven, followed by a three-week run in Boston. This tryout period helped Rodgers and Hammerstein fine tune some of the alleged "problems" facing the production.

It has been said that Act Two was much too long and overplayed, particularly in Agnes de Mille's drawn-out ballet introducing the character Louise. Ethan Mordden's biography of R&H tells of a heated conversation between de Mille and Hammerstein:

"The ballet and its travails so bore upon de Mille in New Haven that in one tormented moment she told Hammerstein that she hated her work and hated herself, and Hammerstein grabbed her and growled, ‘Be careful - you're speaking of the woman I love.’ And embraced her."

In their typical "no-holds-barred" style of editing, the duo quickly addressed the problem by shortening the second act and tightening de Mille's ballet choreography.

Following these revisions in New Haven, the company received enthusiastic responses from Boston audiences. Mordden writes:

". . . the applause was so intense that Jean Darling (Carrie) tried three times - and three times failed - to launch the next scene. The fourth attempt took - but then the Louise, Bambi Linn, reentered, and the Colonial Theatre so rocked with cheers that Linn had to step out of character and take a bow."

On April 19, 1945, crowds gathered outside New York's Majestic Theatre for the opening night of Carousel on Broadway.

Richard Rodgers watched the unfolding of this special night laid out on a hospital stretcher, inside an upper-tier box behind some curtains. He had torn the muscles in his back while carrying his suitcases from train to taxi and, of course, he would not miss this performance for moderate back pain.

With Rodgers settled in his box and soothed with morphine, the show began and progressed without a hitch, eliciting show-stopping bursts of applause, warming and breaking the hearts of its first New York audience.

Following the performance it is said that Mary Rodgers and Steven Sondheim exchanged a silent glance, tears flowing down their faces. Irving Berlin, also in attendance, claimed that "I'll Never Walk Alone" affected him as deeply as the 23rd Psalm.

Rodgers, still reeling from the morphine, thought the performance was a "dismal failure." In his memoir Musical Stages, he says of this night:

". . . so fortified was I against pain that I was also unaware of the laughter and applause, and was convinced that the show was a dismal failure. It was only afterward, when people came over to me - making me feel like an Egyptian mummy on display - that I realized that Carousel had been enthusiastically received."

Carousel ran for 890 performances at the Majestic Theatre, playing to packed houses throughout the run. It won nearly every award possible at the time, including most notably the New York Critics' Award for Best Musical and the Donaldson Awards for best musical, lyrics, score, male performer (John Raitt), male dancer (Peter Birch), stage direction (Rouben Mamoulian) and dance direction (Agnes De Mille).

After the debut of their optimistic and life-affirming Oklahoma!, this muscular and challenging endeavor proved considerably more successful than the pair could have ever imagined.

After its madly triumphant run in New York City, the licensing of Carousel was released to artists and communities around the world. The first national tour ran for nearly two years, beginning in Chicago for five of those twenty-four months.

The New York City Center tackled the first revival in 1949, and in 1950 the same cast moved to London's Drury Theatre for 566 performances. In each of these incarnations, the original staging and choreography were maintained.

It was not until the 1993 Royal National Theatre production that audiences found themselves exposed to new layers of the musical. This contemporary interpretation, directed by Nicholas Hytner and choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, re-imagined both the script and score.

Instead of taking their opening cue from the joy of a rotating carousel, Hytner chose to begin in the textile factory where Julie and Carrie work. It was an overture of tumult, as opposed to the flashy optimism of previous incarnations.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia recounts Michael Haydon's Billy Bigelow "not as a large gruff man but as a smaller, pent-up, frustrated time bomb." This interpretation of the central character rippled throughout the production with familiar songs and scenes taking on an edgier, more topical essence.

This celebrated production transferred to Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1994, featuring an American cast that included Audra McDonald (Carrie), Sally Murphy (Julie) and Michael Hayden (Billy). Nearly a year and 322 performances later, the most recent Broadway revival of Carousel closed.

It would be doing this musical a disservice if one did not also examine its non-theatrical interpretations. Henry King's film version of Carousel premiered in February 1956. King relied heavily on interiors and unrealistic scenic elements at a time when directors were just starting to implement authentic, non-studio centered locales.

Whole songs and scenes were cut in order to keep the film under two hours. On the first day of filming, Frank Sinatra, at the pinnacle of his film career, walked off the set balking at the director's charge to film each scene twice.

Despite all obstacles, Henry King's Carousel was a bonafide hit at the box office. Following the release of the film, the producers endured a grueling legal battle over choreographer Rod Alexander's use of Agnes de Mille's choreography without her prior consent. Ms. de Mille eventually earned credit and compensation.

The 1967 ABC-TV teleplay of Carousel, starring the affable Robert Goulet as Billy and directed by Paul Bogart, received a much more positive response. Abridged to an hour and forty-five minutes, the translation to television benefited from simple production values and illuminated the characters in a way that the epic film could not.

The beautiful thing about a work of Carousel's maturity is, of course, the number of layers resting inside Rodgers and Hammerstein's original frame.

Be it the reworking of Act Two in New Haven, the majesty of Rodgers' opening night sedation, Hytner's unearthing of the darker and more socio-economic layers, or the abridged television special feature, it is clear that Carousel has been a joy for artists and audiences to interpret throughout its six decades.

The evolution of this musical masterpiece seems, in some ways, to mirror the twirling of the carousel itself, allowing for any number of riders to jump on. It seems fitting, then, that the spinning continues in New Haven, where it originated some fifty years ago.

Works Cited

Musical Stages by Richard Rodgers.

The Sound of Their Music by Frederick Nolan.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia edited by Thomas S. Hischak.

Rodgers and Hammerstein by Ethan Mordden.