Musicals are bustin' out all over this June in Scotland's theatres - but the one which stands out as potentially the most ravishing visually and musically is Carousel, which opens at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre next week.

This is the musical which introduced the evergreen ballads If I Loved You and You'll Never Walk Alone to the world, and was made into a much-loved film in 1956.

This new production was a collaboration between Opera North and the Theatre de Chatelet in Paris, and enjoyed terrifically successful runs in the company's home town of Leeds, and in London and Paris in 2012 - along with rave reviews from the critics.

It wasn't the first time that the company had staged a musical. As Opera North's General Director Richard Mantle points out, they brought Showboat to Glasgow 30 years ago and have more recently staged Sweeney Todd and One Touch of Venus.

"Carousel fits in with the genre of musicals that opera companies can do," he says. "We carry the orchestral weight. We have a 40-piece orchestra and 30-strong chorus so we can perform the score as Richard Rodgers wrote it. It's a fantastic company piece and it plays to the strength of Opera North - we have a strong sense of ensemble and company. I view the American musical as the American approach to operetta. Puccini wanted to write an opera of Carousel but the author wouldn't give him permission."

Which brings us to the colourful backstory of Carousel. It started life in 1909, as Liliom, a play by the celebrated Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, which received its American premiere on Broadway in 1921, courtesy of the Theatre Guild. Liliom was the name of the play's anti-hero, the cocky carousel barker and ne'er-do-well loved by wide-eyed Julie who forgives him everything - including beatings - and is left holding the baby when his foray into violent crime doesn't go according to plan.

A blend of fantasy and tragedy, Liliom was a big hit with the American theatre-going public. Orson Welles directed himself and Helen Hayes in a Mercury Theatre radio production in October 1939, and the following year's Broadway revival starred no less A-list a cast than Burgess Meredith, Ingrid Bergman and Elia Kazan.

By 1944, the Theatre Guild had devised a winning formula for producing hits: it had begun to convert popular plays into musicals. Following the success of Oklahoma!, its groundbreaking 1943 show which launched the partnership of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein and which had been based on Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs, the Guild decided that Liliom was an obvious choice for the musical treatment. They weren't alone in their thinking: in addition to Puccini, Kurt Weill had also been knocked back when he asked permission to musicalise it.

However, once Molnar had been persuaded to attend a performance of Oklahoma! he agreed that Liliom could become a musical, as long as Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote the score. But they had their own reservations, chiefly that the setting would have to be changed from Hungary - which, in 1944 was Nazi-occupied having previously been a German ally. An American musical could hardly be set there; it had to be set in an American community.

Eventually, Rodgers came up with the idea of setting it in late 19th century New England - and everything fell into place. Liliom morphed into Billy Bigelow, barker on a carousel in a little fishing town, and the numbers that Rodgers & Hammerstein penned were designed to be performed against the backdrops of clambakes, beaches and boardwalks. Although not as pioneering as Oklahoma!, which is regarded as the first modern American musical, Carousel has its groundbreaking moments, notably the eponymous waltz which replaced the traditional overture format, the extensive second act ballet and, especially, the eight-minute Soliloquy, sung by Bigelow as he imagines his unborn child growing up.

It also has a plotline about domestic abuse which, when viewed from a 21st Century perspective, is shocking in that it seems to suggest that it is excusable or forgivable.

Carousel opened on Broadway in April 1945 and ran for 890 performances; its story of a woman raising her daughter alone hit home with a public whose young men were fighting abroad, and its topical yet timeless message, embodied in the song You'll Never Walk Alone, also touched a nerve. Twentieth Century Fox made a movie version in 1956, with Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones, and, of course, You'll Never Walk Alone went on to have a life of its own.

Opera North's production relocates the story to the early 20th Century, but, says Richard Mantle, is otherwise faithful to the original. And although the source material's author resisted an operatic composer's advances on his play, Mantle believes that seeing it performed by an opera company guarantees theatre-goers "the best musical experience ever". As Billy Bigelow would shout: "Roll up, roll up!"

* Carousel runs at the Festival Theatre from June 2-6. To book tickets, call 0131 529 6000 or visit www.edtheatres.com