Word: liliom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sets to music the traditional Continental world of the small, bedizened, sad-eyed circus troupe-a world not of popcorn but of pony ballets, with a touch of childlike innocence redeeming its tawdriness. Carnival! is, in fact, out of the movie Lili, with a faint echo or two of Liliom; it celebrates a milieu whose romantic lure is born of its realistic hardships, a milieu almost symbolically touching for its way of suggesting the loneliness in crowds, the heartbreak in gaiety, and the homelessness of perky circus wagons...
Like Cole Porter, he could dip into a source play, borrow a line and spin a lyric. In Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, the heroine wonders aloud what it would be like "if I loved you," then pauses to reflect silently. Adapting the play as Carousel, Hammerstein and Rodgers filled the pause with unadorned grace: If I loved...