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.
