He runs the carousel, a rather puny-looking affair considering it's one of the iconic stars of the show – the symbol of fun and freedom. Girls are drawn to the allure of Billy, now attired in barker's mufti. Around them, the New England mill town gawks at the exotic attractions. We know immediately what they've been up to. Anker, platinum blond like Harlow, adjusts her kimono and takes his cigarette. Mullins (Helen Anker), widowed owner of the traveling circus, disheveled and smoking a cigarette. It might be somewhat old hat these days since the team's innovations were universally copied forever after, but it's still a wondrous surprise when the curtain swoops open to reveal a carnival in full swing.Ĭarnival bad boy Billy (baritone Duncan Rock, solid and rock-like) exits the wagon of Mrs. That this opener is scored to one of Rodgers's most haunting and lush melodies, “The Carousel Waltz,” a merry-go-round gone mad with its diapason harmonies and chromatic climax, was designed not so much to startle the audience as it was to get the show going in the best possible dramatic way. They dispense with the overture, starting the play right in the middle of the bustling action with an extended pantomime scene that introduces all the major characters, which sets the tone immediately and throws us right into the telling.

Skillfully adapting their show from Frederic Molnar's dark drama Liliom, American musical theater's most innovative collaborators kept the Hungarian playwright's depression and fantasy, abetted with a more hopeful ending, and irrevocably changed the face of Broadway – again.Ĭarousel is more pulled together, more fully integrated, more musical than Oklahoma, and that's saying something. How do you top that? They did what they knew best: something completely different. When Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (1945) opened on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre, their smash hit Oklahoma (1943), the team's first collaboration, was still running and breaking box-office records right across the street at the St.

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