Teachers, who might normally cringe at the prospect of chaperoning an Upper School field trip, fight tooth and nail to accompany David King-Wood and his ninth grade on one of their forays into downtown Manhattan. After all, who wouldn't want to have a private tour of the Matisse exhibit at MOMA or sit in on a dress rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera? Mr. King-Wood is determined that his ninth graders won't go on to secondary school believing that two hours with Schwartzenegger or Stallone is the only definition of a cultural experience.

This past spring the nines saw a matinée performance of the highly acclaimed revival of the musical Carousel, and to make the performance even richer, Mary Rodgers Guettel, the daughter of Carousel's composer Richard Rodgers, came the day before to speak to the boys. Mrs. Guettel wears many hats. She writes for both children and adults (Freaky Friday, A Billion for Boris and A Word to the Wives) and she has a musical of her own, Once Upon a Mattress, to her credit. At St. Bernard's she spoke with the third grade about her own books and with the ninth about her father, his music, and Carousel.

As a child Mary Rodgers lived in what she considered a completely normal household--as normal as a household could be with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Mary Martin sitting around the dining room table. But Mary, a Brearley girl, was usually in her room wrestling with homework, and in any case autograph-seeking simply was not done. At Brearley it seemed as if every other girl had a surname like Rockefeller or Roosevelt, so it wasn't until Mary got to Wellesley that she realized that being Richard Rodgers' daughter was really quite a big deal. Her father worked at home with the door open, but sounds of "Bali Hai" did not waft through the apartment all day. He was so well trained to hear harmony and melody that he wrote all his music in his head before he sat down at the piano. He composed quickly, but it seemed to take forever to write the manuscript, and it was torture to listen to him transcribing one or two bars at a time. Richard Rodgers never played the piano unless he was writing, and he rarely listened to music. Moreover, Mary and her sister were not allowed to have the radio on just as background noise. Music had to be listened to, not just heard.

Mrs. Guettel talked about her father's partners, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein, who apparently were different as night and day. Hart was a tiny man with enormous talents and equally enormous problems, with alcohol and gambling. This made settling him down to work challenging, to say the least. In this collaboration, the music always came first, and Rodgers had all but to confine Hart to a room and play the melody over and over again until the lyrics came and he could let him out to continue his rounds of the New York night clubs. Oscar Hammerstein, "a great big bear of a man who did his work quickly and peacefully," was a joy as a partner. With Hammerstein the lyrics always came first, a much easier way to work but one requiring a lyric writer with a very strong sense of music. Rodgers and Hammerstein would get together to discuss a scene, zeroing in on its most exciting and powerful part, and then would determine the kind of song required. Then Hammerstein would go off and write the lyrics and would telephone them in or deliver them by hand.

The current version of Carousel was produced by the National Theatre of London and had a successful run in England before opening in New York. There are several unusual things about the production--its non-traditional multi-racial casting being one of them. Although some people have grumbled, the casting has worked well, and it is felt that it enhances the universality of the play's subject matter. It also works well with the abstract set design; no attempt has been made to reproduce a stereotypical New England village. The design is particularly effective at New York's Vivian Beaumont theatre, where the stage's huge thrust gives an incredible sense of the expanse of the show. "It is a brilliant use of space," Mrs. Guettel said, "but totally impractical in terms of traveling. If Carousel tours, it will have to be completely re-designed."

Another major departure is the choreography. Agnes de Mille, "a wonderful, crusty, angry, feisty, brilliant woman" did the dances in the originals. The National Theatre felt they were old-fashioned, and in order to put the stamp of the nineties on their production, they engaged Sir Kenneth Macmillan, best known in England for his ballets. Some people were horrified. Not using Agnes de Mille was tantamount to being "against God and mother and apple pie." But the choreography has been a huge success and in fact accounted for one of Carousel's five Tony awards.

The frisson of anxiety that goes through an audience when someone comes out on stage with a pre-performance announcement must have turned into a roar of disappointment when the news was delivered at one matinée that there would be no show at all. The lead, Michael Hayden, after and especially grueling recording session, wound up with badly bruised vocal chords, and his understudy was out with the flu. Carousel was dark for an unprecedented four days, but who should come to rescue but The Phantom of the Opera. Cameron Mackintosh, the producer, released the lead, who learned the role of Billy Bigelow in forty-eight hours, and gave a performance which more than merited a standing ovation.

If any of the nines were watching the Tony awards last spring, they would have had no trouble at all recognizing one of the three people who accepted Carousel's award for best musical. It was, of course, Mary Rodgers Guettel.

No. 14, Summer 1994, page 3