Review of Carousel (1956) by Edith N — 25 Oct 2007

You know, I can't help thinking that, whatever Julie did to earn enough money to get the house she and Louise live in at the end, she should've been doing it sooner. If she had, Billy might not have turned to a life of crime and died. Then again, we'd have to change an awful lot about our story.

It should be noted, by the way, that before I started [i]Carousel[/i], I first got fed up with [i]Cats[/i]. Nothing happens in it, and the music isn't good enough to make up for the inherent creepiness of the cat costumes. Anyway.

Billy Bigelow starts the story in what we must assume to be heaven, or possibly purgatory, polishing stars. He finds out that his daughter is in some kind of trouble, so he must convince what I guess is God that he should be allowed to go down to Earth to fix it. This necessitates going over the whole story of why he's not on Earth in the first place--a long, often bewildering story starting with his days as the barker on a carousel, not a thing I think of as needing a barker much in the first place. He marries a local girl that he's known for, oh, five minutes. They both lose their jobs. She goes to work for her cousin. He's a layabout. She gets pregnant. He decides that he needs to step up to take care of his kid, which means joining some friend of his on a hairbrained (and illegal!) scheme. His friend gets away; Billy falls on his knife and dies after two more musical numbers.

His daughter, fifteen years later, is being picked on as the daughter of a thief, which she isn't; Billy never actually stole anything. He failed at it, so she's really the daughter of a failure. In fact, Billy doesn't do anything to help his daughter, either, though he does go down to Earth, creep her out, and hit her one.

This is a very weird musical, in other words. It's as though Rogers & Hammerstein (and the Ephrons, who wrote the screenplay) were trying to be socially responsible without actually thinking the plotline through. There are several famous songs in it--"June Is Bustin' Out All Over," "You'll Never Walk Alone," If I Loved You," and so on--but apparently, the soundtrack was more successful than the movie. (Frank Sinatra was originally cast as Billy Bigelow, which would have changed that!) Still, I've seen worse--weirder, even, but those are usually Sondheim.