Word: carousel
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...Carousel (music by Richard Rodgers; book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; produced by the Theatre Guild). All Oklahoma's horses and all Oklahoma's men have put another charmer together again. But Oklahoma's and Carousel's Composer Rodgers, Librettist Hammerstein, Choreographer Agnes de Mille, Director Rouben Mamoulian, Costume Designer Miles White have not repeated themselves. Carousel strays pretty far from Oklahoma!, just as it shies completely away from Broadway. A reworking of Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, it is not a musicomedy but a lovely and appealing "musical play...
...Carousel has moved Liliom from 20th-century Budapest to 19th-Century New England, and renamed the swaggering, bad-tempered barker Billy Bigelow. It has also, to its loss, reduced his swagger and taken away his Continental, scamp-like grace. But it tells much the same story and weaves much the same mood. Billy acts tough for fear of seeming tender, beats his wife lest he reveal he loves her. He commits a crime for his unborn child's sake, dies, leans carelessly against the bar of Heaven, returns to Earth for a day to try to do a good...
...Librettist Hammerstein has not given Carousel the full flavor of Molnar, at least he has given it all the interest of a true play. His script is always simple, sometimes touching, never flashy, only here & there a little cute. And Composer Rodgers has swathed it in one of his warmest and most velvety scores. More than a succession of tunes, the music helps interpret the story; it has operatic climaxes, choral fullness, choreographic lilt. But it is still in tunes that Composer Rodger's real magic lies-whether the tender If I Loved You, the light, murmurous This...
Before intermission, "Carousel" is a mediocre folk opera; after intermission it leaves all bounds of reason. The hero, Billy Bigelow, having committed suicide, is led off by two unidentified gentlemen in tweed suits. In spite of his protests he is taken around the front door of heaven and sent in the back way under the "mother of pearly" gates where he meets heaven's janitor dusting off stars. By now reduced to nothing more than a slushy dramatization of the maxim to live your own life regardless of what your parents were or did, "Carousel" concludes with Billy returning...
...third rate operetta, "Carousel" is bad enough, but as a mystic fantasy with songs it is absurd and over-sentimental...