King’s Carousel “A Real Nice Clambake” is full of picnicky camaraderie and good spirits, but it takes a nose-dive when the news comes that Julie Jordan’s lover Billy Bigelow, botched robbery is dead.
King is casual about having the actors capture the vernacular diction of Maine.
But the clambake is surely familiar and cleverly provides a recipe for the clambake: codfish chowder (with onions and ribbons of salt pork), steamed lobsters with melted butter, and steamed clams:
Nettie: Fust come codfish chowder
Cooked in iron kettles,
Onions floating on the top,
Curlin’ up in petals.
Julie: Throw’d in ribbons of salted pork,
Men: An old New England trick.
Julie: And lapped it all up with a clamshell,
Tied onto a bayberry stick.
The source Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom, set in Budapest, does not have a picnic. In Carousel, however, the clambake provides American adds local color. It is also a perfect setup for the tragedy that follows when Billy Bigelow botches a robbery and dies, leaving his beloved Julie Jordan, a pregnant single mother. Despite the clambake’s aura of contentment, Carousel is thoroughly tinged with dark drama.
The cast: Shirley Jones as Julie Jordan; Gordon MacRae as Billy Bigelow; Claramae Turner as Nettie Fowler; Cameron Mitchell Jigger Craigin
See Henry King. Carousel (1956). The screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron is based on Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical drama (1945); Ferenc Molnár. Liliom. Translated by Benjamin F. Glazer. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921