The first of the coming productions to arrive on Broadway will be Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” which begins performances Feb. 28 and opens April 12. First produced on Broadway in 1945 (and most recently in 1994), the show is about the fraught relationship between a carnival barker named Billy Bigelow (played by Joshua Henry) and a millworker named Julie Jordan (Jessie Mueller).

“Carousel” has long upset some, not only because of the exchange between Julie and her daughter, Louise, about whether a slap can feel like a kiss, but also because Julie seems to accept being hit by Billy, while his best songs can make him seem more sympathetic and ultimately redeemed. (In a 2011 New York magazine debate about the greatest musicals, the critic Frank Rich said “I love Carousel” — to which the writer Nora Ephron responded: “Yes, but you’re a boy.”)

“There weren’t many concerns when it was first staged in 1945, and most productions in the ’50s and ’60s tended to move very quickly over the problems,” said Tim Carter, a professor of music at the University of North Carolina and the author of a book on “Carousel.”

But, he said, in recent years there has been increasing focus on how the central relationship is understood. In 2016, Connecticut College students met with a local domestic violence organization while rehearsing the show, and wound up getting permission to change a line so Julie appears to reject, rather than accept, the idea that being hit hard might not hurt. But the change was for that production only.

“It is almost impossible to rescue the show from Julie Jordan’s apparent acceptance of domestic abuse,” Mr. Carter said. “The only sensible solution — in my view — is to accept the problem and then engage with it, rather than, say, sanitizing the work to remove the problem in the first place. Otherwise there’s no end to it.”