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A (Carousel) Horse of a Different Color

by christopher grobe | May 15, 2008 2:12 pm

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Posted to: Arts

Carousel%20%20LWT%20062.JPGIt’s the classic story: boy meets girl, boy hits girl, but girl (bless her sweet little heart) hardly feels a thing, girl gets knocked up, boy kills self, boy must redeem soul by doing one good thing before passing through the pearly gates.  You know, that old yarn—otherwise known as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.

Based on a 1940s Hungarian tragedy, with just barely enough of an optimistic twist to make it palatable to mid-century American audiences, Carousel was once a daring experiment. The seamless integration of song and scene, the gritty setting in industrialized New England, the blunt sexual undertones of so many of the lyrics—not to mention the musical’s bizarre supernatural twist—all combined to make Carousel a piece of self-conscious experimentation.

No wonder, then, that it caught the eye of revisionist director Charles Newell.  Long Wharf has imported this production from Newell’s Court Theatre in Chicago, a company known primarily for its explorations of classical works, but one that has recently begun dedicating one slot a year to re-examining the American musical.  Newell replaces the standard candy-colored sets and saccharine-sweet crowd numbers with a pared-down production that focuses our attention on the emotional and economic stuntedness of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s characters.

John Culbert’s bare set sets the tone for the evening, operating more on the principle of suggestion than representation.  A rickety collection of warped wood platforms with a patch of dirty, coastal sand peeking out up front suggests a slightly decrepit port town while remaining flexible enough to represent a variety of settings with the addition of telltale props.  (This loosely symbolic sense of space is one way that Newell brings the Court’s classical sensibility fruitfully to bear on musical theater.)

Music director Douglas Peck has matched the spareness of Culbert’s set with reduced orchestrations that sometimes fall away almost completely, letting the raw voices stand alone.  Together with an emphasis on less polished, more talky kinds of singing, Peck succeeds in bringing a distinctly modern sound to Carousel while still doing justice to Rodgers’s rich score.

This controlled aesthetic falls apart, though, when Newell attempts to extend it to the actors and their characterizations.  For instance, as Billy Bigelow (the boy in “boy hits girl”), Nicholas Belton tries for something between a brooding Brando and a frantic Leguizamo.  In the early scenes of the play, this jagged style succeeds in jarring us out of our tragically misguided first impressions of the character—as a smooth-talking womanizer, as a romantic lead who just needs taming, etc.  Indeed, this almost manic-depressive interpretation of Billy reveals a few stunning moments—e.g., an intimate and spontaneous rendition of “Soliloquy,” where Billy muses on his future as a father, first with joy and then with growing terror—but when Belton’s Billy veers toward borderline-psychosis, as it too often does, it seems to cheapen the complex emotions that drive this character.

Johanna McKenzie Miller, as Billy’s belle Julie Jordan, does a better job of balancing a fresh style with a well-worn script.  Her Julie Jordan starts as an enigmatic character, disarmingly blunt in her pursuit of Billy, yet with a deeply private—almost shy—demeanor.  As the plot progresses and as Julie Jordan’s troubles mount, Miller’s performance grows simpler and more direct.

The freshest performance, however, comes from Jessie Mueller as Julie’s friend Carrie Pipperidge.  Her vocal style ranges from a rough-and-ready speaking on pitch to beautiful melodic lines—and everything in between.  It is compelling, direct, and a faithful extension of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s desire to meld script and score into one seamless dramatic unit.  She also manages to make Carrie’s irrational love for the eccentric Enoch Snow (whose most memorable line must surely be “I’m gonna get rich on sardines!”) not only believable but downright touching: no easy task.

Newell’s grittier take on the show hits a brick wall, though, when it reaches Carousel‘s perennially clunky final 20 minutes.  The melodrama of Billy’s death scene clashes with the rest of the production, Culbert’s set fails to capture anything awe-inspiring about the afterlife, and Peck’s orchestrations start to sound downright thin during the rousing finale.  It’s then that you realize how much Newell and his solid cast of singer-actors have been cutting against the grain of this play.

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