"Carousel' at Walnut (1st review)

The young and the vulnerable

STEVE COHEN

The story doesn’t seem promising. A bum can’t tell his wife that he loves her, hits her, bungles a robbery and commits suicide– and yet we care. Because what the play is really about is missed opportunities, and about every one of us who fears that maybe we haven’t told our loved ones how much they mean to us. And it’s about our wish that our parents or our partner told us more directly or more often that they loved us.

These feelings, of course, are universal, and they’re bolstered by the additional themes of a powerless man bucking the establishment and of a family persisting in the face of adversity. Carousel sets all this in a strong narrative that even includes some humor. Ferenc Molnar wrote the play (Liliom) in 1909 and Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted it as a musical in 1945. It still makes an emotional impact and is as relevant today as ever.

The Walnut Street Theatre’s new production is an excellent one, with even more solid casting and conducting than the last two presentations I saw in New York.

A nervous, awkward guy

Jeff Coon has the solid voice one yearns for as our protagonist, Billy Bigelow. He is warm and rich in the lower part of his range and his high notes ring out with power. In this respect, he outshines Michael Hayden, who starred in the Royal National Theater/Lincoln Center production that won a Tony for best revival of 1994, and Hugh Jackman, whom I saw in a concert version at Carnegie Hall in 2002.

(Hayden acted well, I should say in his defense, and phrased musically; but his voice is ordinary and he was too much the nice guy. Jackman was appealing for his earnestness and for embodying the idea of an outsider in New England but he had thin high notes.)

Coon’s interpretation is that of a nervous, awkward guy with a penchant for screwing up and then losing his temper in frustration. He doesn’t play Billy as a bad man. Even his bullying comes across as defensive reaction. He clearly feels helpless against the mill owner who controls the town and against the avaricious and snobbish entrepreneur Enoch Snow and the cops who serve the rich people’s interests. That makes his ballad, "Take Me Before the Highest Judge of All," a dramatic highlight as well as a chance for Coon to belt a high G ending. (This song was unwisely cut from the Broadway revival.)

A younger-looking Julie

With Coon displaying this vulnerability, it’s understandable that Julie Jordan falls for him. Julie Hanson is a younger-looking Julie than I’ve ever seen, and that’s good. Billy refers to "that little kid face" and "that little thing," and she looks the part. Hanson phrases her singing of "If I Loved You" exquisitely. She sings the main thought, "Longing to tell you but afraid and shy, /I’d let my golden chances pass me by," without taking an apparent breath between the words shy and I. All of her singing is excellent, but her enunciation of her speaking lines should be better.

Cary Michele Miller is a spunky and adorable Carrie, as good as I’ve ever heard. (Better than Audra McDonald, whom I love but who sounded too operatic in the 1994 revival.) Katie O’Shaughnessey as Nettie, the woman who introduces "June Is Busting Out All Over" and "You’ll Never Walk Alone," also is better than the operatic types who normally are cast in the role. She sings as if she’s our favorite aunt or our big sister, albeit one with the type of voice that could take her to Broadway.

William Hartery is perfectly cast as Enoch Snow, in appearance, attitude, acting and singing. Kyle Dylan Conner is equally effective as his eldest son, looking and sounding just like his dad. Mary Martello is fine in the non-singing role of the carnival owner, Mrs. Mullen.

A cartoon caricature

Only Christopher Marlowe Roche as Jigger disappoints, because he seems slovenly to an extreme, like a caricature of a low-life (although he is funny). This friend who talks Billy into participation in an armed robbery, and Carrie into a romantic fling, should be oily-smooth and insidious. My ideals in this role are Jerry Orbach in the 1960s and Norbert Lee Butz in 2002.

Carousel has the most symphonic score of any Rodgers and Hammerstein show, and the reduced 13-piece band performed very well. In fact, the chamber-like orchestration revealed more of the harsh dissonance at the start of the overture-waltz than we normally hear. Richard Rodgers wrote a plethora of Viennese-style waltzes in his career, but this dissonance tells us that we’re not in Vienna any more, Dorothy. Conductor Douglass G. Lutz leads a more stylish rendering of the score than I heard at Carnegie Hall when Leonard Slatkin conducted a huge orchestra but screwed up the tempi.

One pleasant surprise

The dances are effectively choreographed by Michelle Gaudette in the Agnes de Mille style. John Farrell’s sets are excellent, with scrims showing the coastal locale and a carousel that’s more vivid than you would expect on this smallish stage. One pleasant surprise was the use of a sand dune instead of the normal bench in the "If I Loved You" scene. In the middle of Billy’s Soliloquy we are transported to a nighttime starry sky (reminiscent of the night when he met Julie), which dissolves into a fleet of fishing boats leaving for the clambake that immediately follows. Beautiful and poetic— but do New England clambakes start at night?

Director Bruce Lumpkin deserves credit for these innovations and for his fine shaping of the actors’ interpretations. He did something unusual for Julie’s singing of "If I Loved You," moving her to downstage center, the spot that stars occupied in our grandfather’s day but which is carefully avoided nowadays. So it was remarkably different to see her begin the song there.

They never say ‘I love you’

Incidentally, Rodgers and Hammerstein took care not to let Billy and Julie sing, "I love you." They only sing about what it would be like if they loved each other. More than that, they never even sing the melody together. In Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show two years earlier, Curly and Laurie coyly sing, "People will say we’re in love." But they join voices on it, and in the second act they even sing, "Let people say we’re in love." In Carousel, the songwriters broke precedent. Despite the fact that duets and reprises were part of the Broadway formula, Rodgers and Hammerstein refused to allow the two Carousel protagonists to do that, either.

I’ve spent more time than usual referring to past performances because this production comes out so favorably in the stiff competition of such comparison.


To read a commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.