Review of 'Carousel'

Rogers and Hammerstein's second musical together, and I don't remember any of the songs from this, except 'June is Bustin Out All Over' and 'You'll Never Walk Alone' - the latter is sung twice, near the end and then right at the end. It's a 'dead person allowed to come back to Earth for one day' sort of story, with most of the time spent on the backstory of the dead man - note that the frame for this is a sort of heaven, but without any religious trappings...the deceased spend their time polishing stars, and the whole place is presided over by a bureaucrat called The Starkeeper.

There are some tremendous dance numbers with better dancing than I remember from lots of Hollywood musicals. I looked up the background on Wikipedia, and it turns out that it's lifted from a Hungarian original set in Budapest, which is interesting in itself. It's set in Maine - perhaps if I was American I'd recognise the accents, which seemed a bit odd.

Rather spoiled by the last five minutes of the final return-to-Earth sequence, in which the male lead lashes out in anger at his now 15-year-old daughter. Later she tells her mother (the dead man's sweetheart and wife) that she felt the hit but that it didn't hurt, and the mother says dreamily that if someone who you love hits you it doesn't hurt. From early we know that he beat his wife - whenever anyone accuses him of beating her he belittles it and says 'hit', with the implication that it only happened once. If that isn't a justification and romanticisation of male violence and abuse against women, then I don't know what it is.

Chatting afterwards I realised how many carousel scenes there are in films!

Watched on BBC iPlayer.