15 July 2018
New York City

Sunday in New York continues at the matinee performance of the revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel, the first of three shows we are seeing over the next few days.  I ordered the tickets on telecharge a couple of months ago, and although I knew we had very good seats, I hadn't realized (or had forgotten) that we were in front row center orchestra seats, directly behind the conductor (who didn't block our view).  I was even able to chat with the conductor, Andy Einhorn, during the intermission.

Carousel is the second collaboration of the R&H team and opened in 1945 to excellent reviews.  It played for over two years and 800 performances at the Majestic Theatre on 44th Street, one of Broadway's largest.  Although it didn't match the popular success of their first musical, Oklahoma! (1943), which played for over five years and 2,000 performances, it was by all measures quite successful.

The music is stunning and the libretto and structure created several milestones in the development of musical theatre.  Today's viewers and reviewers, however, have a problem with the fact that the central male character, Billy Bigelow, is an itinerant thief and wife beater, who often substitutes violence for the expression of emotion.  This is problematic because the female characters, and the point of view of the text, make excuses for his behavior that are unacceptable in our contemporary world--this was even commented upon when the show premiered in 1943.  But, perhaps, a way to reconcile this aspect of the material, is to see that Carousel was actually far ahead of its time in recognizing the presence of this kind of male behavior and addressing it directly, even if we come to different evaluations today.

Purely by chance, our cousin Helen, whom we had come to New York to see, already had tickets for the same performance, with two of her friends, Judy and Kathi (Will and I had met Kathi several times on earlier visits to New York).  After the theatre, the five of us adjourned to Bocca di Bacco, a lively Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue and 45th Street, a neighborhood only a few blocks from the the theatre, formerly known as Hell's Kitchen, but now politely called Clinton.

It has been a long and busy day since our ship docked at 8:30 this morning, so after dinner Will and I head back to our hotel for a good night's rest.  You have probably noticed by now that there are no photos in this blog--and there won't be any in the remaining blogs about New York City.  I was much too busy to take pictures of the city I grew up in and have visited too many times to count since I left for graduate school in Indiana in 1967.

But I will be writing about the rest of our adventures, seeing family and friends, going to the theatre, and enjoying the good food that New York always offers.