Review Details
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«In Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein made a musical that brims over with classic bright-eyed Americana, and yet is the darkest, most troubling drama they ever wrote.
We're not far into it before we know it covers unemployment and conventional ideas of feminine decency. A little further on, it's about male violence to women, excessive gambling and finally a one-parent family and the psychological misery that tempts a teenage girl to reject the world that brought her up.
It's not an all-wonderful musical like Oklahoma! and The King and I. But it is the most deeply touching musical these two colleagues ever wrote.
Throughout it, they keep changing the tone, nowhere more movingly than in the long "If I Loved You" scene for Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan. Of all the falling-in- love scenes in musicals, is there any more quietly persuasive than this? Its changes of pulse and style are marvellously true to human feeling.
The new Chichester Festival production is superbly timed: Britain has not seen a major Carousel since Nicholas Hytner's 1992 National Theatre production. Angus Jackson's staging is eloquently economical, though "If I Loved You" needs more moonlight, space, hush.
Anybody can see how the choreographer Javier de Frutos overdoes certain "sexy" motifs (the stroked breast, the flapped wrist, the shifted pelvis), but overall he carries the drama over into wordless lyricism quite watchably.
I am aware that Rodgers wrote his most expansive vocal lines for a kind of singing that has virtually passed out of today's popular musical theatre. Yet, with the musical direction of Robert Scott, nothing is ever bland and the words hit home.
In the central role of Billy Bigelow, Norman Bowman is right even down to the way he plants his hips when standing with his legs apart: inarticulate virile force and appealing boyish vulnerability are perfectly blended throughout his stance, his face, and his voice.»
- Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times
