What an opener! Director Nicholas Hytner’s provocative new reading of Carousel floods an American classic with fresh air and fresh ideas. For audiences that know this 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical chiefly from the 1956 movie, the “Carousel” that opened last week at New York’s Lincoln Center will be a revelation. No longer the sexless story of a marshmallow (soprano) in love with a meanie (baritone), this production peels away swaths of sentimentality to lay bare the rough edges and ready passions of real drama.
Hytner, the British director who premiered this production in London in 1992 to tremendous acclaim, does well by the splendid score (which was horribly truncated in the movie) and livens up the characters. They needed it. Billy Bigelow (Michael Hayden), a carnival barker who slaps women around, isn’t exactly a role model for the ’90s. Nor is Julie Jordan (Sally Murphy). A mill worker who’s crazy about Billy, she knows he hits her only because he’s insecure, and anyway, it doesn’t hurt. After they marry, Billy dies in a desperate, botched robbery attempt, and finds he must earn his entry into heaven by going back to earth to do some good. He succeeds, but the happy ending in “Carousel” is almost entirely dependent upon the emotional power of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” by now a hackneyed source of instant uplift at weddings, funerals and graduations. Hytner had his work cut out for him.
What he did was retain the story but deepen and broaden our angle of vision. Bob Crowley’s spare, beautiful sets, which have the intimacy of a folk-art painting, help draw us in. The first-act scene where Billy and Julie fall in love is played atop a green hillock-hence, they’re constantly on the move, shifting their balance, changing their view of one another. Julie is an innocent, but she’s restless, slightly disheveled, grappling visibly with her feelings. In the course of the scene she grows less tentative. By the time she sings “If I Loved You,” it’s not just a plaintive anthem but a challenge, practically a threat. Similarly, Billy remains a young tough, but he, too, is forced to scramble for a hold on his emotions. Singing “If I Loved You” in return, he conveys a sweetness he shows only in song, never in speech. And only to Julie. When they finally embrace, the sexual chemistry is palpable because the attraction is utterly believable. These lovers are at last on the same footing.
There is nothing coy about this “Carousel,” and there’s very little piety. (“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is plenty pious, but with the characters and their strife so vividly realized, the inspirational ending seems less like frosting and more like much-needed redemption.) Helping to keep the show more vigorous than sweet are the honest, raucous dances, credited to Kenneth MacMillan but largely completed by his associate Jane Elliot after his death in 1992. Only the ballet for Billy and Julie’s daughter (Sandra Brown) and her lowlife heartthrob (Jon Marshall Sharp) is entirely MacMillan’s, and it looks like his other work: a lot of hyperinflated posturing. Brown and Sharp, fine dancers, do their best with it.
Hayden is outstanding as Billy, subtly modulating the bombast to show a bit of warmth and boyish humor, while making plain his deep-rooted despair. His singing voice is small but pleasing, and he’s able to project the soliloquy (“My boy Bill”) with impressive strength through the sheer force of his acting. Murphy, fragile and sweet-voiced, gives the problematic part of Julie all the spine she can. It’s virtually impossible today to make credible a character whose motto could be “Stand by your abusive husband”; Murphy comes pretty close. The rest of the ensemble is first-rate (although the rich, creamy voice of opera star Shirley Verrett seems out of place here) but it’s hard to notice anyone else when Julie’s friend Carrie (Audra Ann McDonald) is around (box). McDonald has wit, charm and knockout musicality; her rendition of “(When I Marry) Mr. Snow” is priceless. (Oh yes, she’s black. And Mr. Snow, the delightful Eddie Korbich, is white. Their eight children are various races. It’s wonderful.)
One reason this “Carousel” works so well is that Hytner respects the form. “The great American musicals are worthy to be ranked with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill,” he says. “I wanted to prove that this form shouldn’t be looked down on.” At home in both opera and classical drama, he is best known here for “Miss Saigon”-the extravagant musical that might have been conceived on another planet from “Carousel.” “‘Miss Saigon’ is very much a footnote to my work,” says Hytner. If he really wants to put “Miss Saigon” behind him, maybe he should tackle a good musical about war, race and rapture-“South Pacific.”
PHOTOS: Fresh Air and Fresh Ideas: Billy and Julie woo each other in the moonlight (far left), raucous dances keep this show vigorous (left), when the clock strikes 6 the whole town comes to life (right)
SHE TRAINED AS AN OPERA singer, not in musical comedy. She never even studied acting. So what’s Andra McDonald doing in “Carousel”? Only stealing the show. As Julie Jordan’s matrimony-minded sidekick, Carrie, McDonald rescues the character from decades of Ado Annie cuteness with a sassy, naturally sensual performance that gives added meaning to her lusty come-on to Mr. Snow-“Here I am!”
McDonald, 23, grew up in that bastion of culture and lettuce known as Fresno, Calif. After years of embarrassing her father by drowning out the church choir, she escaped to New York’s Juilliard School for classical voice training. “I hated it. I didn’t want to give in to that completely operatic sound,” she says. As an antidote, she spent summers in regional productions of “Evita” and “Man of La Mancha”; she was touring with “Secret Garden” when her agent called to say that after six auditions she could ride the Broadway “Carousel.” “I was petrified. I didn’t think I could do comedy. I’m used to being beaten and raped and killed in shows,” she says. “When they cast me, it was like, ‘My God-how am I going to pull this off?’”
Lucky for McDonald, her grandmother bore eight children. just as her character does. “That’s who I called for research,” she says. But mostly she injected Carrie with a dose of her own infectious personality. “The stereotypical Carrie would have been like me putting on a Laura Ashley dress,” she laughs. “I don’t even own a purse. Going to the opera with a backpack is getting bad.” Never mind she’s a Broadway baby now.
