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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, a podcast that tells the incredible story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode, How the Bench Scene Changed Everything.

[0:36] David Armstrong: Over the course of our last several episodes, we traced the development of the Broadway musical throughout the 1920s and 30s, what I call the Silver Age. Musicals in those decades were often delightful but somewhat ramshackle creations, with songs that were often only very loosely tied to the story and characters. However, during this same period, smart and ambitious writers began to gradually push the form forward, and the stories, music, lyrics, and subject matter of Broadway musicals became increasingly more sophisticated, ambitious, and complex. Among those writers were Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers. Separately, they both had tremendous success with Silver Age-style shows, but when they joined forces to become Rodgers and Hammerstein, they ushered the Broadway musical into its golden age.

Last week, we briefly discussed Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Carousel and its groundbreaking musical sequence known as The Bench Scene. Today, the remarkable Albert Evans will take us even further inside the music with a fascinating and in-depth look at that landmark sequence and help us to understand why this was such an important and crucial development in the invention of the Broadway musical. Now it's my great pleasure to turn this episode over to Albert Evans.

[1:54] Albert Evans: Stephen Sondheim called the If I Loved You scene in Carousel the single most important moment in the evolution of the contemporary musical theater. And let's be honest, that's not a very exciting title. It's not the murder scene or the abduction scene or the trial scene. Well, it's called The Bench Scene because it's set on and around a park bench under a tree in full blossom near the carousel that gives the musical its name. So what made The Bench Scene so different, so important? To answer that, let's review the way plots unfolded in the stereotypical musical comedy of the 20s and 30s. To kick off the love plot, a boy and a girl would meet, maybe even in a park, with a bench. At first, they'd flirt.

The girl would be standoffish. Then the boy would woo her with a song, often leading into a dance. And the audience would go, aw, don't they make a nice couple? Applause, applause, applause. Then they'd disappear for a scene or two before their romance progressed. Basically, the whole show was about their courtship. If they admitted to love at first sight, let's get married, there'd be nothing left to do. To prevent that, their relationship would be filled with complications and misunderstandings and wounded pride, punctuated with whatever potential hit songs the writers had concocted. And as David mentioned, sometimes the songs would seem irrelevant to the story, but musicals, remember, were primarily a way to introduce songs.

That's where the real money was. Shows weren't expected to have an afterlife beyond their initial run, but a hit song could generate money for years in recordings and sheet music sales. A musical comedy love scene would usually be built around a single song, consisting of a sort of functional verse to establish whatever story point the audience needed to know, and then it would move into a melodic refrain. This is what we think of as the song proper. Lyrically, usually not too specific, so that it could be sung outside the show in a lot of different circumstances. And that's exactly what Hammerstein, collaborating with Rogers, did not want to do anymore. In Oklahoma, they had made giant strides, integrating the songs into the plot, making them specific to the characters.

But Oklahoma, for all its innovations, still had one foot in musical comedy land, in the world of the Silver Age musical, where a hick cowboy could suddenly reveal himself to be a highly skilled song and dance man, and then sort of melt back into the plot. But the carousel bench scene is made in a new way. It's all about character, revealed through words and music. Yes, it builds toward If I Loved You, a big extractable song. But before we get there, Billy and Julie test each other, and they move the plot along not in an efficient throwaway verse, but in a deftly interwoven series of what you might call songlets. And it's so brilliantly written that after about 12 minutes of highly concentrated music drama, and without Billy and Julie ever admitting their love, we know that in some way, on some higher plane that they don't even understand, their souls have bonded.

So let's take a closer look at how that's accomplished. Carousel opens unconventionally, no overture, but with a suite of waltzes, during which we meet most of the principal characters, not in dialogue or song and dance, but in pantomime, as they enjoy an after-work outing at a local amusement park in a New England coastal town in the 1870s. The young girls of the town are attracted to the carousel, or more specifically to its cocky, good-looking barker, Billy Bigelow. Billy focuses his attention on Julie Jordan, a local mill worker who is his intended conquest for the evening. But Julie and her friend Carrie are shooed away by the carousel's owner.

[6:17] Albert Evans: A middle-aged widow named Mrs. Mullen, who keeps Billy around as her own private boy toy. The scene shifts to a nearby park with that fateful bench, and for the first time we hear the characters speak. Mrs. Mullen scolds the girls for letting her barker get too free with them, and the three women seem ready for a fight. When Billy himself interrupts, he takes Julie's side and is promptly fired by his boss. So he leaves to go get his things, saying he'll be back for Julie. While he's gone, Carrie tries to get Julie to open up about her attraction to Billy, and we sneak into the first song. Julie, Julie, do you like him? I don't know. Did you like it when he talked to you today, when he put you on the carousel that way? Did you like that? I'd rather not say. It introduces two musical themes that will be important later. You're a queer one, Julie Jordan, interwoven with what I call the monotony theme. Let's listen.

[7:25] ♪ Musical number: "You're a Queer One, Julie Jordan" — performed by the cast of Carousel ♪

[8:22] Albert Evans: Which represents, I think, the endless hours weaving fabric at the cotton mill. Well, Billy returns, and Carrie reluctantly leaves, reminding Julie that if she's not back at the boarding house by curfew, she'll lose her job. As Billy begins his usual seduction, Julie confesses that she's been to the carousel many, many times, and we start to think, is she stalking Billy? The owner of the mill passes by, along with a policeman, and in the presence of authority, Billy bristles. The mill owner offers to escort Julie home, but she boldly declares that no, she'll stay with Billy. We realize by now that Carousel is about the social order and its restrictions on human behavior. Up to now, both Julie and Billy have been policed, Julie by the mill owner and Billy by his boss, Mrs. Mullen. Now the bench scene proper starts, building on the two themes we've heard already, queer one and monotony, and it introduces a new

[9:26] ⚠ About 4 minutes of audio could not be automatically transcribed.

[13:11] Albert Evans: Time and again I would try to say all I'd want you to know if I loved you. Hammerstein made a specialty of writing provisional love songs. This allowed him to place the song early in the show that lets the audience know that two characters are in love but aren't ready to admit it. The first was "Make Believe" from Show Boat. Only make believe I love you. Only make believe that you love me. In other words, I'm not going to say I love you but let's make believe that I do. And the second is from Oklahoma. People will say we're in love. Stop looking at me like that. Stop giving me presents. Don't laugh at my jokes. People will say we're in love. But "If I Loved You" goes beyond flirting to something much deeper.

First Julie and then Billy singing this great passionate melody see that their love is doomed. If I loved you words wouldn't come in an easy way. Round in circles I'd go. Time and again round in circles. Carousel is about repetition. About going in circles like a carousel. Life is a journey that gets you nowhere. It's about foolish and destructive patterns that persist for generations and the timidity and shame that keep us from breaking them. Billy and Julie's tragedy is that although they know they are destined to be together they are somehow never able to say the simple words I love you. Longing to tell you but afraid and shy. I'd let my golden chances pass me by. And then the final desolate vision.

Soon you'd leave me. Off you would go in the mist of day. Never, never to know how I loved you. If I loved you. The song is so compelling that we don't realize it's one big spoiler. It gives away the whole rest of the show. Let's hear Julie sing it.

[15:13] ♪ Musical number: "If I Loved You" — performed by Julie ♪

[16:59] Albert Evans: Well, anyway, I mean you don't love me. I mean that's what you said, isn't it?

[17:15] Unknown speaker: Yes. I can smell them, can you? The blossoms. The wind brings them down. There ain't much wind tonight.

[17:41] Albert Evans: Hardly any. For the first time in his life, Billy looks deep into himself and says things about life and loneliness and futility that he has never expressed before. Not tough, cocky Billy Bigelow. And to show this new side, Richard Rogers gives him a new melody. A melody of his own. You can't hear a sound. Not the turn of a leaf. Nor the fall of a wave hitting the sand. The tides creeping up on the beach like a thief. Afraid to be caught stealing the land. On a night like this, I start to wonder what life is all about. And I always say two heads are better than one to figure it out.

[18:50] Unknown speaker: I don't need you. I don't need anybody helping me. I mean, I got it figured out for myself. We're not important. What are we? A couple of specks of nothing. Look up there. There's a hell of a lot of stars in the sky. And the sky's so big, the sea looks small. And two little people, you and I, we don't count at all.

[19:36] Unknown speaker: You're a funny kid. You know, I never remember meeting a girl like you. Hey, you trying to get me to marry you?

[19:48] Unknown speaker: No.

[19:49] Unknown speaker: Well, what's putting it into my head then? What's putting it into my head? Not Julie. She's been quite clear. I'm never going to marry. So, Billy makes a little speech about what a mistake marriage would be. He even borrows Julie's monotony theme to describe how restricting, how intolerable, how un-Billy it would be to fall into that trap. Yet, he's changed. His short conversation with Julie, probably the first deep conversation he's ever had with another person, has made her necessary to him. Julie mostly keeps quiet and lets Billy figure it out for himself.

[20:34] Unknown speaker: You're different, all right. I don't know what it is. You look up at me with that little kid's face like you trusted me. I wonder what it'd be like.

[20:51] Unknown speaker: What?

[20:52] Unknown speaker: Nothing. No, no, I know what it'd be like. It'd be awful. I can just see myself. Kind of scrawny and pale, picking at my food and lovesick like any other guy. I'd throw away my sweater and dress up like a dude in a dickie and the collar and the tie if I loved you.

[21:17] Unknown speaker: But you don't.

[21:18] Unknown speaker: No, I don't. But somehow I can see just exactly how I'd be.

[21:37] ♪ Musical number: "If I Loved You" — performed by Billy ♪

[23:19] Unknown speaker: I'm not the kind of fella to marry anybody. No, even if a girl was foolish enough to want me to, I wouldn't.

[23:35] Unknown speaker: Don't worry about it, Billy.

[23:42] Unknown speaker: I was worried. You're right about there being no wind. The blossoms are just coming down by themselves. Just their time too, I reckon. They move toward each other. They embrace. They kiss. The bench scene has changed Billy and Julie and musical theater forever.

[24:36] David Armstrong: Thank you, Albert. As I think Albert just made abundantly clear in that remarkable analysis, Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers revolutionized the Broadway musical with their unprecedented, seamless integration of book, music, and lyrics in Carousel. Both the bench scene and their equally groundbreaking soliloquy took them far beyond what they had achieved in Oklahoma. Instead of using the sing-song recitative of opera, both the soliloquy and the bench scene utilize what Albert calls songlets to weave together powerful sequences of dramatic musical theater. These innovations would inspire nearly every musical theater writer from the golden age of Broadway right up to today, and we can clearly see their influence in the brilliant extended musical sequences of such diverse shows as West Side Story, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, Ragtime, Les Miserables, The Band's Visit, Hadestown, and Hamilton, to name only a few.

[25:33] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. This episode featured the amazing writing and analysis of Albert Evans. I want to thank everyone at KVSH 101.9, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and everyone at the Broadway Podcast Network. If you enjoy these podcasts, it would be very helpful if you would take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find Broadway Nation.