CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago- Page 8

#176CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

Which is even better than Carousel.

#178CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

Billy Bigelow is known as an abusive husband. That's his character. If you know one thing about the show besides the songs, it's that he is abusive.

#180CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

That "love music" is 'If I Loved You' and it's being played because of Julie, not Louise. The order isn't "Billy slaps Louise, play 'If I Loved You.'" Billy slaps her, she runs in and the Heavenly Friend shouts at him "Failure!" and essentially how whenever things don't turn out his way, he hits someone he loves. Then, in the messy sequence of events, Julie runs out and sees Billy for a brief second, which is what causes the orchestra to play 'If I Loved You." Then the scene shifts focus from Louise to Julie, who eventually sees the star and understands that through some brief miracle, Billy came back. The music being played isn't to say "He slapped me and wasn't it all romantic," but to echo a time when all of this was still ahead and there was just Billy and Julie on a bench, alone in the world, together. Only now, it's no longer "If I loved you" but "HOW I loved you." It isn't romantic and it isn't wholesome. It's devastating. 

The movie gets so much wrong, but one of its biggest offenses is taking this scene and making the focus about Louise AND Julie: connecting and romanticizing the slap, their faces pressed together as if it's straight out of Lassie. There was an article once about what was the greatest Broadway musical and Nora Ephron was a part of the discussion and she complained about Carousel because of that scene. That always drove me crazy, because that's not how the scene is played in the show and it was HER parents that terribly adapted Carousel for the screen and it was their screenplay she was remembering. 

Carousel is a great work, if with a few flaws. One flaw it does NOT have, though, is its treatment of domestic violence. It's about characters who encounter domestic violence, but the show itself almost goes out of its way to point out that it is wrong. But because it's a Rodger and Hammerstein musical, many people take the central story at face value and assume Hammerstein (and Molnar) intended for Billy and Julie's love to be an-against all odds battle that endures in the end. That's not what the story is.

#182CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

PERFECTLY said!  Bravo. 

And that's hysterical--I remember having the same thought when I read that round-table with Nora about the best musical, and being angry that she was basing it on the movie, but I didn't put two and two together about the screenwriters...  It really is a shoddy movie--Were R&H just too busy worrying about their other movies and shows and since Carousel wasn't a big hit and the censors wanted changes anyway they just shrugged it off?  I mean from the opening scene, even BEFORE the credits--when it starts in outside the Mother-of-Pearly gates...  Sigh.

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To anyone who messaged me about my recording,

Act 2 turned out great, but for some reason Act 1 is really quiet. I'm trying to figure out how to bump up the volume. Any advice?

#186CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

well like i said, i have yet to see a production! Billy is evil

#188CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

"Billy is evil"

Nope.

#190CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

Phillypinto, you're wrong. It's not a matter of opinion or interpretation. You're just wrong. I didn't get a chance to listen to this broadcast, but if that's what you got from it then Ashford and Pasquale did something wrong. I highly doubt they did (well, Ashford might've but you can't tell as much from a radio broadcast). I don't have the energy to type up a new response to how wrong you are, so I went back and found this post I wrote about the PBS broadcast of the concert at Lincoln Center a while back. You probably won't have the patience or discipline to read all of it, but for the rest of you, I hope you enjoy it:

In the show, during that time period with that kind of social hierarchy, Billy and Julie are, indeed, white trash. That's not saying that poor people are white trash. But in Carousel, to people like Mr. Bascombe, who thinks of Julie merely as an employee (if you think for a second he actually cares about her and not her reflection on him when he offers to bring her back to the mill, you're giving Bascombe too much credit), they are absolutely the lowest you can get just short of a street beggar. Even when Billy HAD a job, it was as a carousel barker in a traveling carnival. That's fascinating and dangerous to young women, especially those who wouldn't mind one quick night of passion that would be forgotten as soon as the carnival moves on to the next town, but in no way is it a respectable occupation. The fact that being a barker is all that Billy knows and likes speaks volumes about his incompetence. He's not a bad person. But in terms of where he stands in that society, he's just about the lowest. Once Julie marries him, any social standing she might have had (which is just barely above Billy) is gone.

I really do hate it when Julie is portrayed as somewhat classy and dignified. It really clouds the audience's perception of where Julie stands in life and what her prospects are. If she's so refined and level-headed, why would she choose to stay with Billy and lose her job? If Mr. Bascombe is SUCH a nice man that he's willing to give Julie a second chance (that's sarcasm, as Mr. Bascombe isn't a nice man, he's a God-fearing business man), why wouldn't she go with him? Julie is young and lonely and can't see anything in her future that would give her any happiness. She clearly could marry if she chose, as there's an indication that she had some sort of a beau once ("A fella you went walking with"), but she never loved him and couldn't bring herself to move the relationship any further than walking "nowhere special." In Billy, she sees a kindred lonely spirit who might be the one bit of happiness she'll ever know in her cold, sad life. And so, with a bit of skepticism and embarrassment, she chooses to stay and enjoy her fifteen minutes of happiness.

That entire "If I Loved You" scene is a masterpiece of confusion, longing, frustration, sexual tension and danger that concludes with (what should be) a very passionate kiss. In the Hytner production, the final 30 seconds were staged with Billy and Julie falling into each other's arms, the grassy knoll they were on slowly moving backwards, the entire stage dark with the exception of a single spotlight on the two of them that was getting smaller and smaller, all the while Billy and Julie clinging to each other as if they feared they would fall into the darkness, should they let go. It was a great moment foreshadowing why the two would stay together until Billy's untimely death. Their relationship might be toxic to each other, but they're all that each other has. Let go, and there's nothing but darkness surrounding.

Billy is, to be blunt, a bum. But he's aware of that ("What can I do for her? I'm a bum with no money") and it eats him up inside. To Billy, he once had the perfect life. He had a low pressure, no responsibility job that allowed him to make money, drink free beer and charm women and sometimes even bed them with no consequences. The one string attached was that he would have to sometimes sleep with his boss. Not at all a setback for someone like Billy who always found sex and women a carefree pleasure that was quickly forgotten after it was done. For him to go from that to a situation where he is now responsible for two people, where he has to rely on the kindness of his wife's female cousin who has her own business and him making no money or working at any kind of a job, knowing that everyone around looks down upon him for it, just about kills Billy inside. He wants to provide for Julie, but he just doesn't know how. And every time they're together he's reminded of how he's doing nothing for the woman he loves. That hatred towards himself builds up inside of him as a pressure cooker, making him explode at inopportune times and taking it out on the people he cares about. It doesn't make him a hero, but it does makes him human.

Billy and Julie absolutely are relatable to Stella and Stanley in Streetcar, though I would say that Streetcar is more outright in the dialogue about their sexual attraction and as to why Stella stays. "If Loved You" isn't a meet cute and "What's the Use of Wondrin" isn't another "Can't Help Lovin That Man." They are about, respectively, the culmination of two souls finding solace in a cold world and of the resolution of having to accept it when that solace isn't perfect or even enough because in the end, it's really all you have. This is all the more tragic considering how young Julie and Billy are. What made Murphy and Hayden and (from the footage I saw) Wicks and Snyder so effective, was that their melancholy came from the foresight of knowing they had a future of nothing ever getting better, as opposed to the many years of life experience that eventually taught them that.

#192CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

Wickedfan, why did you write that to them? You weren't a fan of the concert?

#194CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

Philly, you're just digging yourself in deeper by talking about a musical you don't know.  No, Billy is not evil and no, he does not slap people around in the show.  Again I suggest that you familiarize yourself with the musical before continuing with all of these uninformed opinions.

#196CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

Wilmington, I do know the show from reading it, and listening to it, plus listening to the Chicago production just now. I can take away whatever I want from it because it is MY opinion!! And he does slap people

#198CAROUSEL at the Lyric Opera in Chicago

"I imagine that it had to do with the censors of 1958 Hollywood and the attempts to make the movie just over two hours long, where the musicals is almost 3."

 The censors can only really account for not letting Billy commit suicide (can't "reward" suicide with Heaven now, can we?)  Basic things--such as making the Bench Scene a traditional dialogue/song scene have nothing to do with censors--or the extremely clumsy way they try to match studio and location shots (though some of this may be due to the studios not wanting to spend the money they were willing to spend on OK, SP and K&I which are much more sure things.)