TIME magazine named it the best musical of the 20th Century!
In a Maine coastal village toward the end of the 19th century, the swaggering, carefree carnival barker Billy Bigelow captivates and marries the nave mill worker Julie Jordan. Billy loses his job just as he learns that Julie is pregnant and, desperately intent upon providing a decent life for his family, he is coerced into being an accomplice to a robbery. Caught in the act and facing the certainty of prison, he takes his own life and is sent up there. Billy is allowed to return to earth for one day. Time, being what it is up there, 15 years have passed, and he now encounters the teenage daughter he never knew. She is a lonely, friendless child, her fathers reputation as a thief and bully having haunted her throughout her young life. How Billy instills in both the child and her mother a sense of hope and dignity is a dramatic testimony to the power of love.
CAROUSEL is the second stage musical by the team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics). The work premiered in 1945. The show includes the well-known songs If I Loved You, June Is Bustin Out All Over and You'll Never Walk Alone. Richard Rodgers later wrote that CAROUSEL was his favorite among all his musicals. Following the spectacular success of the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma! (1943), the pair sought to collaborate on another piece, knowing that any resulting work would be compared with Oklahoma!, most likely unfavorably.
CAROUSEL opened on Broadway on April 19, 1945, and was an immediate hit with both critics and audiences. CAROUSEL initially ran for 890 performances and duplicated its success in the West End in 1950. Though it has never achieved as much commercial success as Oklahoma!, the piece has been repeatedly revived, and has been recorded several times. In 1999, Time magazine named CAROUSEL the best musical of the 20th century. With soaring orchestrations, hauntingly beautiful songs and energetic frolics of dance, CAROUSEL is truly a musical theatre masterpiece.
