When he tries to give her a star, though, she gets creeped out and refuses to take it, and he slaps her. She’s wary of him because he’s a stranger, but she warms up a bit after he tells her he was a friend of her dad’s. Besides, they’d only been married two months, and he’d only hit her once.īut then in the second-to-last scene, Billy comes back to earth to help out his daughter, Louise, who’s having a rough time because she’s a teenager growing up in a small town with a single mom and no money and because she’s inherited her father’s combative temperament. Divorce wasn’t really an option in the 40s, when the show was written, or the 30s, when the Lyric’s production takes place, not to mention the 1870s, when it was originally set. Julie’s big act two number, “What’s the Use of Won’drin'” is a big old “stand by your man” thing, and I could see her point of view there too. Well, OK, it was the Depression and Billy was out of work, and it was clear he didn’t have the sweetest temper anyway. But then something happened in the penultimate scene that wrecked the whole thing for me.Ībout halfway through act one, the heroine, Julie, tells her best friend, Carrie, that her husband, Billy, hit her. I don’t think I contributed to the general sniffling during “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” but I did get chills during the “Soliloquy.” I could even tolerate the cornier aspects (“A Real Nice Clambake”) and the weirdness of its afterlife cosmology (the Starkeeper, who seems to think that you can redeem your sorry life by giving people cardboard stars). It was a great production: music, singing, dancing, even acting, usually a weak point in musicals. (“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. 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. The other night, I decided to take advantage of the Lyric’s rush ticket program and go see Carousel. The giddy beginning: Laura Osnes and Steven Pasquale as Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow.Now Playing: Chicago’s history in movie ads.
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