Carousel (1945) is the second musical by the team of Richard Rodgers
(music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), after their hit
Oklahoma! (1943). It was adapted from Ferenc Molnár's 1909 play Liliom,
transplanting the setting to the U.S. state of Maine. Carousel barker
Billy Bigelow's romance with millworker Julie Jordan cost them their
jobs; after he attempts a robbery that goes tragically wrong, he is
given a chance to make things right. The show includes the songs "If I
Loved You", "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never
Walk
Alone". It opened on Broadway on April 19, 1945, and was an immediate
hit with both critics and audiences. It initially ran there for 890
performances, and duplicated its success in the West End in 1950. It has
been repeatedly revived and recorded. A 1992 production by Nicholas
Hytner enjoyed success in London, in New York, and on tour. Rodgers
later wrote that Carousel was his favorite of all his musicals. In 1999,
Time magazine named it the best musical of the 20th century.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_(musical)>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1111:
Henry V, the last ruler of the Salian dynasty, was crowned Holy
Roman Emperor.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor>
1829:
The Roman Catholic Relief Act was granted royal assent,
removing the most substantial restrictions on Catholics in the United
Kingdom.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Relief_Act_1829>
1943:
World War II: German news announced the discovery of a mass
grave in Katyn, Russia, of Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet
forces, causing a diplomatic rift between the Polish government-in-exile
and the USSR.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre>
1958:
In the midst of the Cold War, American pianist Van Cliburn won
the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Cliburn>
1984:
Indian forces launched Operation Meghdoot, a preemptive attack
on the disputed Siachen Glacier region of Kashmir, triggering a military
conflict with Pakistan.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siachen_conflict>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
magnality:
A great or wonderful thing; a marvel.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/magnality>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of
our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that
confidence is every where the parent of despotism; free government is
founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not
confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those
whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has
accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence
may go; and let the honest advocate of confidence read the Alien and
Sedition Acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing
limits to the government it created, and whether we should be wise in
destroying those limits; let him say what the government is, if it be
not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on the
President, and the President of our choice has assented to and accepted,
over the friendly strangers, to whom the mild spirit of our country and
its laws had pledged hospitality and protection; that the men of our
choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President than the
solid rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force
of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions
of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him
down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
--Thomas Jefferson
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson>