Description
The role of the dramaturg in the musical theatre is an oft-neglected and underestimated position. This analysis and case study seeks to defend the importance of musical theatre dramaturgy through a case study of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel. Since its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, the musical theatre has served an important function as a popular expression of an evolving American culture. In Carousel, American audiences encountered themselves, but unlike the harsh realities that life after World War II presented them at home, this version offered them a happy ending. With the war officially behind them, the musical marked a chance for Americans to begin again. As theatre historian Gerald Mast states in his book Can't Help Singin', "If Oklahoma! developed the moral argument for sending American boys overseas, Carousel offered consolation to those wives and mothers whose boys would only return in spirit." Opening in April 1945, the very year that saw the conclusion of the Second World War, the musical became a voice for the shell-shocked and guilt-ridden soldiers coming home to a society in which they no longer knew how to integrate or participate. This analysis deconstructs Carousel, and specifically its leading man, Billy Bigelow, within the historical context of the musical's original production and in light of its relationship to its source material, Ferenc Molnar's 1921 play, Liliom. Within this framing, the analysis utilizes the diagnostic for Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as described by Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence -- from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, and the lens of Pain Theory, as developed by Elaine Scarry. By investigating Rogers and Hammerstein's musical in this light, this deconstruction proposes a richer understanding of the musical as a cultural response to World War II with continued relevancy as a vehicle for theatre therapy as espoused by The Theatre of War in the aftermath of the Iraq "War on Terror."
