Carrie in Carousel--Spoiler Warning!!!!!!!!!

[Mattbrain]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 7:26pm

After Carrie gets dumped by Mr. Snow, what happens to her? Is there any other mention of her in the show?

[Mattbrain]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 8:16pm

Seriously,

I wanna know
Can you show me

Couldn't resist. I even sang it as I wrote it.

[Calvin]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 8:18pm

She doesn't get dumped by Mister Snow. They get married and have a gaggle of children, just like he wanted. And they turned out snobby and looked down on Julie's daughter (this all is revealed in the ballet portion). Her relationship is an example of emotional abuse of a passionless marriage, compared the the physical abuse endured by Julie.
Updated On: 9/5/06 at 08:18 PM

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 8:31pm

There is absolutely nothing in the script to indicate that Carrie's marriage to Mr. Snow is absuive in any way. I have no idea where you are getting that.

[Calvin]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 8:36pm

By emotional abuse -- I mean his methodical approach to marriage. Does "When The Children Are Asleep" really sound like a romantic proposal? Does "Geraniums In The Winder"?

eta: Perhaps abuse isn't the right word. Updated On: 9/5/06 at 08:36 PM

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 9:16pm

You can certainly call their romantic ideas about marriage old fashioned, and perhaps a woman today wouldn't agree with their philosophy, but taken in the days the show takes place and during the time the musical was written, those songs reflect a rosy, comfy - i.e. happy view of marriage.

Mr. Snow and Carrie are also the comic relief of the piece. I suppose you could look at OKLAHOMA! and say the lyrics "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No" must reflect a character who suffered child hood sexual abuse or that "All or Nothing" is about the threats of marital infidelity, but that would be to completely misinterpret the author's original intent.

If anything Enoch and Carrie's happiness and financial prosperity is the real juxtaposition to Julie's marriage to Billy.
Updated On: 9/5/06 at 09:16 PM

[Calvin]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 9:23pm

I'm probably being influenced by what might have been a bizarre choice by my director when I did this show to try to emphasize that point. Because the show certainly needs to be a lot darker. I always thought of Jigger as the comic relief -- except for the whole being sorta responsible for Billy's death, thing.

But didn't they have a similar take in the most recent revival?

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 9:29pm

No. The Nick Hytner revival of CAROUSEL did not turn Enoch and Carrie's marriage into something passionless and unhappy. Frankly, your director was a little misguided and he probably only made his audiences passionless and unhappy.

There is subtext and than there is rewriting the show by way of making completely invalid directorial choices.

The pathos of CAROUSEL is Julie's doomed love affair with Billy Bigelow. If you don't have some happy counter balance between the other characters, their relationship seems trite and heavy handed.

[Calvin]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 9:46pm

It could also be that I'm doing a poor job of explaining this. This was all several years ago, and I wasn't playing Mr. Snow, so my memory of the character discussions of him is a bit foggy. The director in question was one who, in my opinion, had a history of remaining pretty true to the material.

How it was done wasn't even something that would probably have been obvious to most in the audience. Carrie was played much in the same way that I had always seen her played, although Mr. Snow might have been sterner and less goofy than usual. It came down to a few choices to their brief moments around the ballet and how Carrie turned out, not so much of what happened in their courtship.

What it boiled down to was the raw, sexual heat that was at the core of the Julie/Billy relationship contrasted to the Enoch/Carrie one.

[Jon]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 10:35pm

Here's my view: Enoch and Carrie's marriage represents the safe, conventional family. Billy ands Julie had a love that transcended the mundane existence of the Snows.

Jigger is more than comic relief - he represents temptation. He's the devil.

[StageManager2]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 10:39pm

You guys certainly like to overanalyze.

[Jazzysuite82]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 10:55pm

seriously...

[Smaxie]

Posted: 9/5/06 at 11:12pm

>You guys certainly like to overanalyze.<

Well, if there's a Golden Age musical more spiritual, more cosmic, and more downright strange than Carousel, I don't know what it is. Worthy of analysis, in my book.

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 9/6/06 at 12:52am

If you think CAROUSEL is strange, you should check out the source material, LILIOM. Now that's downright bizarre.

But if we're talking musicals of that period, another R&H gem should be mentioned as equally odd, ALLEGRO.

[wiggum2]

Posted: 9/6/06 at 4:49pm

In real life, they had children. My BF's family were Snows. R&H based them on real people. I've never seen the show so I don't know all the details but my BF's grandmother(a snow) went to the premiere of the movie in NYC IIRC. The Snows are pretty popular in Maine. You can buy their chowder in every grocery store

[Mattbrain]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 5:05pm

I thought they did something different in the 1994 Revival. Didn't they or no? If they did, I'd like some details.

[endlessmedley]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 5:08pm

wait...in the versions i've seen (and the movie too i think) i distinctly remember that carrie does not marry mr. snow- in the revival she does???

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 6:44pm

In the original, it's Carrie and Snow's children who torment Julie's daughter in the Act Two ballet. That's from the script published by Random House in the 1950s as part of the collection of R&H musicals.

[Jon]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 9:13pm

What the hell version have you seen in which the Snows do not marry?

Mr. Snow appears with his six children in the ballet. The oldest girl taunts Louise, while the oldest boy (Enoch Jr.) clearly has a crush on her. Then there's a whole scene in which Carrie (with her newborn seventh child in her arms) talks about the recent trip she and Enoch took to New York City. Later in the same scene, Enoch Junior asks Louise to marry him. When he admits he'd be "marrying beneath his station", Louise takes a swing at him and chases him off. In the final scene, Louise and Enoch Jr. are graduatijg high school, and the entire Snow family is there.

[endlessmedley]

Posted: 9/7/06 at 9:59pm

wow, how did i miss that?

[SeanMartin]

Posted: 9/8/06 at 1:47am

Just checked the script, and Carrie's in Act Two, Scene Five, talking about the trip to NY with Enoch and the *nine* kids.

Updated On: 9/8/06 at 01:47 AM

[Jon]

Posted: 9/8/06 at 7:07am

Wow - I guess I'm used to productions that decided six kids (and a baby doll) was plenty!

[Calvin]

Posted: 9/8/06 at 9:01am

I don't remember the number in ours. I just remember that I hated them all.

[ScottyDoesn'tKnow]

Posted: 8/16/07 at 9:59am

This thread is hilarious, seriously. I had to bump this up.

One of my favorite lines is where Carrie and Julie are talking after Carrie and Mr. Snow tell Julie about their trip to NYC and even after having 9 kids, Carrie is still her fun, peppy self when around Julie. Mr. Snow is a bit embarrassed and tells Carrie to have more sense and Carrie responds with "If I had more sense, I wouldn't have had 9 kids."

Since we're trying to bring subtext that isn't there, in the film version at least, did anyone else sorta see Mr. Snow having a small crush on Julie during that scene? JUICY.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/16/07 at 11:15am

Carrie and Mr. Snow have a "conventional" marriage, comfy, secure, and if it hints at something less-than-romantic, that's fine too. But it isn't "loveless" or "cold." It just "average" and "ordinary" in the world of conventional marriages.

Julie and Billy's marriage is full of passion, drama, instability, heated emotions, and plenty of "excitement," and look where it got them.

Food for thought for "romantics" in any era, and YES, this piece deserves to be over-analyzed and over-discussed. It's one of the best ever written for musical theatre, and it's full of "grey areas," not neat and tidy "black and white" truths or characters.

You'd be hard to top it today, or any day for that matter.