- Todd Rosenberg
- The giddy beginning: Laura Osnes and Steven Pasquale as Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow
The other night, I decided to take advantage of the Lyric’s rush ticket program and go see Carousel. This would be my first Carousel, but I’d heard a lot recently about its greatness and that it was darker and more complex than the other Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which I sometimes find a little hard to take. (“Sickly, goody-goody songs,” as Pauline Kael put it in her review of The Sound of Music.) Anyway, this production was supposed to be an especially fine one, and it was nice to have an excuse to get dressed up and visit the Civic Opera House.
And then when Louise tells Julie about what happened, she says that even though he hit her, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt like a kiss! Is that possible, she asks? Yes, it’s possible, Julie says. In the next scene, Louise graduates from high school and Billy comes back as a spirit to let her and Julie know how much he loves them and is redeemed, sort of, even though he’s still dead.
“This comes up a lot,” he said. “I’m not condoning it, but Liliom was first played in 1909, and the world is obviously different now.”
Someday, like 75 years from now, there will be a revival of something that is popular now and someone will go see it and be amazed at how appalling and hateful it is and ask a dramaturg how he or she can possibly justify it. Maybe the dramaturg will say something like what Pines said:
