“June
is bustin' out all over
The
feelin' is gettin' so intense,
That
the young Virginia creepers
Hev
been huggin' the bejeepers
Outa
all the mornin' glories on the fence!”—“June Is Bustin' Out All Over,” from the
musical Carousel (1945), book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music
by Richard Rodgers
Probably
for the entire time I’ve maintained this blog, I’ve wanted to quote from this
song, yet I never got around to it. Then last weekend, while listening in my
car to National Public Radio, I heard novelist Julia Keller extol this “wonderfully
corny” showtune by Richard Rodgers
and Oscar Hammerstein II, and I knew
I must write about this, and soon.
Even
in miniature here, you can see in abundance Hammerstein’s lyric gifts. It is a marvel that this immensely
sophisticated urbanite could write lines filled with such love of nature and an
capacity not just to hear slang, but to give birth to new forms of it
(“bejeepeers”) —a celebration of literary propagation that matches the song’s
glory in natural propagation.
This
second Rodgers and Hammerstein musical needs all the comic exuberance it can
get from this song. Before long, the two main young characters, Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan will be as
powerless to resist their natural instincts as the flora and fauna are in their
New England coastal town.
As
I wrote in a prior post, the current toasts of Broadway were pioneering new,
uneasy territory with Carousel. If
they were going to persuade audiences to reject out of hand a male protagonist who was a
no-account wife-beater, they had to offer something that wouldn’t overturn
expectations from the start. “June Is Bustin' Out All Over” would provide
welcome comic relief in one of the darkest entries in the American musical
theater.
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