Rogers and Hammerstein and Me

Last week Turner Classic Movies honored actor/singer Gordon MacRae by running a whole day of his films.  In this process they ran Oklahoma and Carousel back-to-back.  I watched Oklahoma that night and recorded Carousel to watch the next day. Together these two musicals are credited with changing the form of the Broadway musical from a “musical comedy”  to a “musical play.”  What is the difference?  In a musical comedy the story often stops for the cast to perform a musical number for the audience and then takes back up again with the song is over.  In a musical play, the story and the characters are developed by the music as well as the dialogue and dramatic events. The cast never performs for the audience. The music is used to advance the story and to develop the characters.  Oscar Hammerstein started down this road with Showboat but he made the complete transition with Oklahoma.

I have had the privilege of appearing in each of these musicals on stage.  I am certainly not the “Curly” or “Billy Bigelow” type so I was never the lead. I had minor roles: Judge Carnes, Ado Annie’s father, and The Heavenly Friend who takes Billy Bigelow to heaven and guides him on his one visit to earth. Let me take the two shows in the order I came to know them.

Carousel, 1969, produced by the A Cappella Choir at Arkansas A& M College, Monticello, Arkansas, directed by our choir director Mr. John Dougherty. 

These cast members were part of our Christian group.  W.L. is now with the Lord but Danny and Evie and I are still the best of friends. I wish I had more photos!

I had become an actor in my senior year of High School with leads in a Fall one-act, High Window, (Walter) and a Spring three-act, The Curious Savage, (Senator Titus Savage).  I found out that I could act pretty well, so the next two summers I had the lead in two plays for my hometown community theatre, the “Helena Little Theatre:” Alice in Wonderland (King of Hearts) and The Wizard of Oz, (the Cowardly Lion.)  I loved music and I loved theatre but I knew nothing about music theatre.  That changed with our college production of Carousel. My character did not appear until act two so I made up a character, taking the name, Oren Peasley, from a line in the intro to the song, “This Was a Real Nice Clambake.”  I made Oren a pickpocket in the employ of Mrs. Mullins who owned the carousel.  It gave me something to do while I was in the chorus.

The Heavenly Friend entered the story just after Billy Bigelow had accidentally killed himself by falling on his knife.  While the cast sang, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” over his body, I was in the wings preparing to come on stage, wake him up, and take him to heaven to meet, “The Highest Judge of All.”

Backstory
I must add some important context here.  In June of 1968, I had received my Exhorter’s Permit, the first level of ministerial recognition, from the Arkansas District Council of the Assemblies of God.  So, in addition to my formal studies as a sophomore music major at A&M, I was also involved in a less formal ministerial study through the Berean School of the Bible, a correspondence school offered by the church. I was learning the truth about music and the truth about the Gospel at the same time.  I was also preaching at every opportunity and served as president of our student ministry group, Chi Alpha.  This was the beginning of the Jesus Movement and our campus fellowship was not at all sectarian.  We loved the Lord and each other paying little attention to our differences.

Back to the Play
As I was waiting for the song to end so I could make my entrance, I was having a prayerful conversation with the Lord.  I heard people crying in the audience.  I did not understand this at all.  I asked the Lord, “Why are they crying?  There is no truth in this? My character is going to take Billy Bigelow to heaven and him bring back to earth to earn his way into heaven.  That’s not the truth!”  It was as if the Lord put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the heart and said, “I’m going to use you to put My Truth into this form.”  The song ended and I made my entrance with my line, “Get up, Billy!”

That surprising moment was a major turning point in my life.  In addition to my call to preach and the call to be a music teacher/music minister, and a writer, I was supposed to study these two things:

1. The Lord’s Truth, and
2. The artistic form of Music Theatre.

We produced another musical a couple of years later, Once upon a Mattress, where I had a non-singing lead, (“The King”) which was a lot of fun but absolutely devoid of any truth.  When I started teaching at my hometown high school I began writing my first script, My Father’s House, based on the story of the Prodigal Son but I had no way of producing it.  When we made the leap from music education to music ministry it was in the days of traveling Youth Choirs so I added dramatic touches to these productions. I also experienced one adaptation of a John W. Peterson Easter Cantata into a play but all I did was conduct.

My First Time Out
In 1980, at the Christmas season, I wrote my first script for a Ralph Carmichael musical called ‘Specially for Shepherds. This was wonderful Broadway-style theatre music but, oddly enough, there was no script or even any narration.  The church I was serving, Bethel Assembly of God in Wichita, KS, had a wonderful choir and orchestra and—an acting company!—His Creations. All of these artists were really, really skillful and they were mine to lead! My life-long friend Larry Hartley had developed this company of skillful, delightful actors, so under Larry’s guidance I wrote my first music theatre script.  All the while, in the Christmas season in 1980, my mind was filled with that undeniable call way back in the Spring of 1969.  I felt so assisted by the Holy Spirit as I sought to “put the Lord’s Truth into the Music Theatre form.”

In the years since then, I have had the joy of writing more than 20 scripts, most for my own production companies in Wichita KS, Bethel Arts Ministries, in Winston-Salem, NC, Carolina Christian Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, Cathedral Arts Ministries, and Springfield, VA, Capitol Christian Arts, and others on assignment from other worship arts pastors.  I developed the expanded concept of what I called “The Cycle” where the Christmas play is part one and the Easter play is part two of the Jesus story. With the cycle concept characters could be much more highly developed; a child at Christmas was an adult in the Easter play, etc. The 30 years difference in the two stories is a rich source of inspiration.  I even tried my hand at converting one of my Christmas plays into a novel, The Promise of the Star. I hope this will be the first volume of a trilogy of novels taken from other plays, The Promise of the Son  and The Promise of the Father which would take the Jesus story from the Nativity, through the Gospel of Christ, all the way to the 15^th Chapter of Acts. I have also written a full year of daily devotions called The Jesus Story, found at “PathofLifeDevoptions.com.

The Form of the Musical Play
As I watched the film versions of Oklahoma and Carousel the memories were sweet but also my appreciation for the craft of Rogers and Hammerstein grew even deeper. There is much more to the distinctive form of a musical play than just the absence of songs performed for the audience.  Let me attempt a list of the high points of this craft.

• These stories are character-driven, not spectacle-driven. There can be impressive staging, amazing musical performances, beautiful scenery and costuming but characters move the story along. Their experience in the course of the play is what is known as a character arc.  This means each character is a different person at the end of the play than at the beginning.  This is a characteristic of all drama, but with the musical play, the music is a major force in this transformation.
• The power of the reprise is a vital element in the musical play. The term “reprise” means that a song that has already been presented returns at a crucial moment adding a deeper meaning than when first presented.  For instance, when Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan first sing “If I Loved You” they have just met and are not in love at all.  At the end of the play when Billy has returned to earth and expressed his love for Julie, which he could not do before, the song occurs again, this time with new words and a wonderful truth.  The power of the reprise was most useful to me in my scripts.  Here is an example: A wonderful song, “Broken and Spilled Out” was sung by Mary of Bethany as she broke her alabaster jar and poured it on Jesus’ feet.  Later, as Jesus is dying on the cross, Mary’s beautiful voice is lifted above the noise of the mob as she sings the chorus again a cappella. Wow!  I choke up just remembering this moment.  The reprise can also happen as underscoring.  I wrote an opening song very much in the style of a film score called “Behold Him” to open a play by the same name.  For it to be a theme, it had to have a distinctive melody and a full orchestration. When Jesus was alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, a solo violin softly played that tune as He prayed.  It was a tender moment to be sure. The power of the reprise is a vital part of the musical theatre artform.
• Irony is also a vital part of this dramatic form. The definition of the word “theatre” means “a place to see something.”  Objects take on meaning, many times bringing out intriguing ironies in the story.  Not all truth is best expressed in words. Objects often are used to emphasize the deeper truths in the story.  Here are two examples from my plays:

1. The sweatband worn by Jesus’ brother James in the carpenter’s shop became the symbol of obedience to the will of God in Behold Him: the Carpenter’s Crown.
2. A nail from the crucifixion of her husband, the Apostle James, the first of the 12 disciples to die, becomes a symbol of forgiveness to the Apostle’s widow in Behold Him: Paul’s Story.

These and other creative devices are available to us as we tell the Lord’s story in the fullness of the musical theatre form.

What about Oklahoma?
My experience in the first of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical plays came much later. I was privileged to appear in a local production at Polk State College directed by Professor Mark Hatfield. Back when I was in college, Mr. Dougherty had produced Oklahoma the Spring semester before I came to school but in our production of Carousel, he told us that the structure and cast of the two plays were identical.  It is true! I invite you to analyze both plays and you will see.  However, with identical structures the two plays could not more different from each other. Oklahoma opened on Broadway in 1943 as America was at war with most of the world.  The producers gave away unsold tickets to servicemen each night.  The story is very much a love song to the country they were fighting for.  It remains that way to this day.  It is bright and optimistic and fun even though the “bad guy” dies at the end.

Carousel, on the other hand, is about as dark as a play can get.  There is plenty of happy music but the story itself is fatalistic and depressing, although the wonderful “You’ll Never Walk Alone” tries its best to bring a note of hope at the end.  I remember asking Mr. Dougherty why the play was called “Carousel?’  I don’t remember his answer.  It remained a mystery to me until 1993 when a new full-cast CD was produced and I bought it. It had all the music, even the songs cut from the film.  As I listened, 20+ years after I first started learning about this play, I suddenly realized why it had that name.  As I listened to the new recordings the theme that had alluded me all those years ago jumped out at me in almost every song.  “Life is just an endless circle!” There is no meaning to it. We just get on board the carousel and “round in circles we go” until, like the blossoms on the Springtime trees, we take our final dive to the ground.  It is not the wind. As Julie says, “It’s just their time to, I reckon.”

What does that mean?  Only this: this story that takes place near the end of the 19^th century but it preaches 20^th century dogma from beginning to end. What is that dogma?  Relativism—there is no absolute truth. Nothing is bad or good, so “What’s the use of wonderin’?” When “June is bustin’ out all over,” you just gotta do whatcha gotta do. There is no real judgement day after this life, but hey, no one knows for sure. Life is an endless circle with no meaning. Just get on and ride the carousel!

That brings me back to that moment and my prayerful conversation with God before I went on stage to wake Billy up. I was right—there was no truth in that play!  Truth is what the world needs, not pointless speculation, not relativistic reveries, but life-giving lessons that send the audience home with real hope in their hearts and the knowledge that they are not, have not been, and will never be alone.  “Walk on! Walk on!”

Semper Reformanda!

Stephen Phifer