A Problematic Musical with a Stormy Theme Song-"When You Walk through a Storm"

Would a musical be produced today that’s built around the idea of sticking with an abusive spouse no matter what and to some extent normalizing the abuse? Could it include the line, “Has it ever happened to you? Has anyone ever hit you — without hurtin’?” To which the answer is yes: “It is possible, dear, fer someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” And that line is delivered from a mother to a daughter, thus paving the way for perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Honestly! The musical is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel, and it’s an odd duck, often labeled as a “problem” musical or even as “the wife-beater musical.” Billy Bigelow, said wife-beater and main villain, echoes other characters in popular theater such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and John Wayne’s character in the film McLintock!, to name just a couple, who hit their wives and not only get away with it but whose wives respond lovingly. (I am horrified by the spanking scene at the end of McLintock!, and apparently it’s not the only such scene in the movie.) When he’s asked about his abuse by the Starkeeper, head man in heaven’s waiting room, Billy Bigelow says he does not beat his wife. “I wouldn’t beat a little thing like that — I hit her,” he explains. But to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this paragraph: Yes, indeed, Carousel is performed today, sometimes with the problematic lines cut and sometimes with them included. One production compromised by having the dead Billy shake his head “No!” in response to the “not hurt at all” line. That’s perhaps the best way to deal with the issue, since just cutting those few lines in no way erases the overall arc of the plot. Indeed, Carousel was considered groundbreaking at the time of its original production because of its anti-hero lead male character and its tragic plot. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already broken new ground in their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, which used the songs to advance a well-developed plot, and Hammerstein had included controversial ideas about racism in his collaboration with Jerome Kern for Show Boat.

The team of Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers wanted a new challenge for their second musical after the success of Oklahoma!, knowing that anything they did would be compared, probably unfavorably, with that hit. The Hungarian play Liliom was suggested to them, at first unsuccessfully. They felt that the plot was too dark, and the playwright Ferenc Molnár had up to that time refused to give permission for any adaptations. (This whole idea of permissions is a fraught one; since Molnár was the originator of the story he could have sued if someone used it in a way of which he disapproved. In addition, since the story was his intellectual property he needed some sort of compensation for it.) But eventually all of the details were worked out, and the setting was changed to New England. Hammerstein owned a house in Connecticut and thought that location had great possibilities, saying that:

I began to see an attractive ensemble—sailors, whalers, girls who worked in the mills up the river, clambakes on near-by islands, an amusement park on the seaboard, things people could do in crowds, people who were strong and alive and lusty, people who had always been depicted on the stage as thin-lipped puritans—a libel I was anxious to refute … as for the two leading characters, Julie with her courage and inner strength and outward simplicity seemed more indigenous to Maine than to Budapest. Liliom is, of course, an international character, indigenous to nowhere.¹

The whole story of Carousel‘s journey to Broadway is beyond the scope of this post; I would highly recommend our old friend Wikipedia²‘s article if you’re a fan of musicals and their histories. Here I want to make the point that the hit songs from a show are often totally divorced in public memory from their actual context within the plot. Since I’m very much a newcomer to the world of musical theater I’ve found it fascinating to find out what’s really going on around those pieces. (I’m no stranger to strange plots, though, as I’m a devoted opera fan.) It’s fair to point out, by the way, that the musical’s debut coincided with the approaching end of World War II, and its message, all about triumphing through hardship and looking forward to a brighter day was very much in time with the zeitgeist of the time. America was just about to get to the top of that mountain and declare victory, first over Germany and its European allies and then over Japan.

By the way, very funny story about the Broadway premier: Richard Rodgers had injured his back the week before and couldn’t sit in a regular chair, so he watched from a stretcher at the side of the stage, behind the curtain. He therefore couldn’t hear much at all of the audience’s reaction and thought that the whole thing had been a failure because there didn’t seem to be any laughter or applause. It was only after he was inundated with congratulations by friends that he realized how successful it had been.

So where does “You’ll Never Walk Alone” fit into the plot? It appears twice: at the death scene for Billy, who has participated in a failed robbery and stabbed himself rather than be captured, and then as the finale of the musical as a whole. In the first instance, Julie’s cousin Nettie sings the song to her as Julie fearfully wonders what she’s going to do now that Billy is dead and she’s expecting his baby. Then the song is repeated at the graduation scene of Julie and Billy’s daughter Louise. In the original play the lines about the non-hurting blow come at the end, and Billy, who has been given a second chance at heaven, is then ushered off to hell because he hit Louise after she refused to accept the gift of a star from him. (It’s complicated.) Hammerstein made several stabs at a more uplifting ending, and finally came up with the idea of Louise’s graduation ceremony forming the venue for the song’s reprise. You’ll see both scenes from the filmed version in the video below.

One choral version of the song also includes “Climb Every Mountain,” from yet another Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music. This lovely arrangement is by the prolific composer and arranger Mark Hayes. I won’t go into the whole backstory of this song, as this post is pretty long as is. But here’s a good performance that gives you a good idea of Hayes’ melding of the two songs: