"Rip's Carousel" (Reinventing the Wheel)

Director Diane Paulus is reinterpreting Porgy and Bess, the 1945 Gershwin opera, in an upcoming Broadway theater production of the work that she plans to call The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess.  If I understand it correctly, she is keeping most of the music but is shortening the piece and adapting it to make the characters more multi-dimensional and accessible to today’s audiences (in her opinion).  She is doing so with the full blessings of the estates of George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, and DuBose Heyward, who co-wrote the lyrics with Ira and was the author of the novel Porgy upon which the original opera was based. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/theater/porgy-and-bess-with-audra-mcdonald.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
No big deal, right? Not only is it the prerogative of a director to interpret a work, isn’t updating and reinterpreting classic works (even sometimes opera) all the rage on Broadway? One has to imagine that when writing “Rent” that Jonathan Larsen veered much further from Puccini’s La Boheme than Paulus is straying from the original Porgy and Bess.

Ah, but the “purists,” including no less than Stephen Sondheim himself, have risen up to condemn Paulus, her interpretation, and her viewpoints. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/stephen-sondheim-takes-issue-with-plan-for-revamped-porgy-and-bess/?hpw  My first thought was "What does Sondheim care?" He has allowed several drastic reinterpretations of his own works (e.g. Sweeney Todd, Company) in recent years. Of course, he is entitled to his opinion, just as Paulus is entitled to hers.

I pretty much love everything the Gershwins ever wrote, and I am not familiar enough with Porgy and Bess in its entirety to have a personal opinion about whether the work needs to be reinterpreted. I can tell you that there are musicals that I would re-write in a heartbeat, given the chance.

Let’s examine Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein for just a second, shall we? I loathe the book of this show, and let me tell you why. (SPOILER ALERT- the rest of this blog reveals most of the plot of “Carousel.”)

Okay, so Carousel is about Billy Bigelow, a carnival worker, who takes up with sweet-young-thing Julie Jordan. He marries her, loses his job, beats her because he is frustrated that he is unemployed, gets her pregnant, and then dies while committing a burglary so that he can feed the family. A series of bad choices, if you ask me. Inexplicably, Billy is not sent straight to Hell when he dies, but instead spends 15 years in purgatory.

Then an angel sends him down to earth to redeem himself by helping his troubled 15-year-old daughter, Louise. He talks to her for a while, and THEN smacks her. Julie tells her daughter, and this is a quote: "Sometimes a hit is just like a kiss." This somehow turns Louise around, and Billy gets into heaven. It glorifies domestic violence, and that was never acceptable, even in the 40's when it was written. It literally makes my skin crawl.

It’s a shame really, because it has a nice subplot about Carrie, Julie’s quirky best friend, and Mr. Snow, the decent (if less glamorous) fisherman she marries, and some exceptionally beautiful songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, whose work I admire as much as I do the Gershwins. You’ll Never Walk Alone is a song I can sing by a character I could play (cousin Nettie), but I could never live with myself if I appeared in a production of Carousel as written.

This is why I would love to get my hands on Carousel. We could call it Rip’s Carousel. It wouldn’t take much to fix it. First things first, I would cut This Was a Real Nice Clambake, one of the most inane songs in all of musical theater history. “The vittles we et [sic] were good you bet.” Boy, they don’t write lyrics like that anymore. Thank goodness.

Then all I would have to change is the ending. Billy would return to earth and explain to his daughter that it is never okay for a man to hit a woman under any circumstances. He might even apologize for making her life so difficult. Julie would tell her that while she loved her father, his violent temper and abusive nature ruined her life and caused his early death, and that is why she, Louise, should never accept that kind of behavior in a man or in herself. Louise would have the guidance that would give her a fighting chance for a happy life, and Billy would go to heaven.

Then I…um, I mean Cousin Nettie…would return to the stage to lead the entire company in a rousing encore of You’ll Never Walk Alone.