The Musical as Drama

friend has found as a boyfriend ( Julie proves he is a common
porter). The result in the episode between Julie and Liliom
(the barker’s name in Molnar) is a series of five pauses when
Julie refuses to be shaken by Liliom’s attempts to prove himself
dangerous. One of the pauses falls on the line “if I loved you,
Mr. Liliom,” which is where Rodgers and Hammerstein moved
in for their love song. Pauses in dialogue are something like
numbers in musicals. They suspend the dialectical progress, as
though something is being consolidated in the minds of the
characters. Subtext is the concept most obvious to actors at such
moments in nonmusical plays, and one way musicals move into
new dimensions of characterization is by raising subtext to ex-
pressiveness through song and dance.
The bench scene is such a hallmark of musical theatre that
we should see exactly how it works. The “Mister Snow” episode
begins with orchestral underscoring while the spoken dialogue
between Julie and Carrie turns to rhyme. The tenth meas-
ure sends Carrie into “You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan,” a
sixteen-measure segment shared between the two women,
which leads to the different song material of “When we work
at the mill,” twenty measures in which Carrie details Julie’s
daydreaming habits on the job. A return to “You’re a Queer
One, Julie Jordan” makes this entire musical exchange between
Julie and Carrie seem like a lop-sided song in itself, AA′BA,
with a long B section formed by “When we work at the mill,”
but this impression is bound to change later, when the seg-
ments are repeated independently by Julie and Billy Bigelow in
the latter half of the scene.
The orchestral underscoring continues after Carrie manages
to end her “Julie Jordan” segment on a mistake: “Sphink,” she
attempts, to rhyme with “think.” “Sphinx,” Julie corrects her,
while the orchestra underscores the dialogue with eight mea-
sures from “You’re a Queer One.” I have a feller of my own,
says Carrie as the orchestra plays, and Julie asks, what’s his
name? leading into the next segment, Carrie’s “His name is
Mister Snow.”
This strikes me as the key moment in the scene. “His name
is Mister Snow” is an apparent AABA song that refuses that

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