The musical exchanges are fundamental to the drama being
enacted here. Magnolia is showing that she can play a love
match with Gaylord, so one could say the plot and character
are being advanced in the interests of integration. One could
also say—and this would be the more important point—that
Magnolia’s willingness to play a love match in eight-bar seg-
ments of uncompleted songs sets up the true drama of the
scene, which is her voicing of the song itself, the reprise of
“Make Believe,” her response to the song Gaylord has already
sung, which he then joins as a duet. The underscoring orches-
tra sets these exchanges in motion, shifts their keys, gives the
unexpected half-diminished chord to “regret.” These under-
scored segments of song lead to the achievement of song itself.
The reprise of “Make Believe,” with Magnolia voicing the high
notes as Gaylord supports her through harmony, is the drama
of the scene. Song is not serving the interests of character and
plot, song ischaracter and plot.
The Bench Scene in Carousel
The classic case is the bench scene in Carousel, where under-
scoring and song segments lead into two major numbers,
“When I Marry Mr. Snow” and “If I Loved You.” The scene
begins with Julie Jordan (the girl on the carousel in the previ-
ous scene) talking to her friend Carrie about boys. It ends with
Julie talking to Billy Bigelow, the carousel barker, about love.^6
The orchestra underscores both episodes, putting them into
musical time and making song the important dramatic con-
sideration. The scene without music—in book time, in other
words—can be studied in the source play, Molnar’s Liliom.^7
It proceeds by the dialectical method of statement and coun-
terstatement, one thing leading to another. The result in the
episode between the girls is a redefinition of the “soldier” Julie’s
134 CHAPTER SIX
(^6) Mordden describes the two-part structure neatly in Beautiful Mornin’, p. 88.
(^7) I follow the translation by B. F. Glazer in The Theatre Guild Anthology(New
York: Random House, 1936).