“You’ll Never Walk Alone”
It is May of 2020, and I do not have a brain well suited to this.
I find more and more that I refer to it as “it” and “this” without naming or needing to name, because we are sharing the rare human experience so ubiquitous that the pronouns require no antecedent. Horror and suffering abound in every direction, and I want writing to be a break from it. Still, it makes its way in—like light through window blinds, like floodwater through shut doors.
I suppose you are reading this in my future. Maybe you are reading in a future so distant from my present that “this” is over. I know it will never fully end—the next normal will be different from the last one. But there will be a next normal, and I hope you are living in it, and I hope I am living in it with you.
In the meantime, I have to live in this, and find comfort where I can. For me, lately, comfort has meant a show tune.
In 1909, the Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár debuted his new play, Liliom, in Budapest. In the play, Liliom, a troubled and periodically violent young carousel barker, falls in love with a woman named Julie. When Julie becomes pregnant, Liliom attempts a robbery to support his burgeoning family, but the robbery is a disaster, and Liliom dies. He ends up in purgatory for sixteen years, after which he is allowed a single day to visit his now-teenaged daughter, Louise.
Liliom flopped in Budapest, but Molnár was not a playwright who suffered from a shortage of self-belief. He continued mounting productions around Europe and then eventually in the U.S., where a 1921 translation of the play attracted good reviews and moderate box office success.
The composer Giacomo Puccini tried to adapt Liliom into an opera, but Molnár refused to sell him the rights, because he wanted “Liliom to be remembered as a play by Molnár, not as an opera by Puccini.” Instead, Molnár sold the rights to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, the musical theater duo who were fresh off the success of Oklahoma! In doing so, Molnár ensured that Liliom would be remembered almost entirely as a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, retitled Carousel, which premiered in 1945.
