Richard Rodgers said that Carousel was his favorite among his scores, and the closest to opera he had ever composed. So the prospect of the production by the Boston Lyric Opera was promising. And all the more so because it would be mounted at the Colonial Theater where 80 years ago this month, the newly created Carousel played a pre-Broadway tryout.

Despite some superb singing from an impressive young cast, this is no tribute production. As has been their curious habit in recent years, BLO chose to impose a Big Concept on Carousel, and in so doing have robbed it of much of its humanity. BLO would have done better to have shown confidence in the original material.

That said, the music remains gloriously undiminished. Indeed, the orchestra under the able direction of David Angus, was the star of this show. The former chorus master and staff conductor for the Glyndebourne Festival, Angus clearly knows how to bring out the best from his musicians. The first seven rows of seats were removed to make way for the orchestra’s 46 players, much larger than the norm for Broadway shows, and yet exactly the size used for Carousel’s 1945 opening. Bravo, BLO, for that. The orchestra played majestically in their big moments, and with great intimacy when underscoring Oscar Hammerstein II’s often tender dialogue.

My colleague and publisher adds:

David Angus brought out this show in its original (and very detailed orchestration) with showmanlike sparkle. He could get the band to swing and the strings to slide juicily. Solos from concertmaster Anne Rabbat and oboist Nancy Dimmock sounded top drawer. And his collaboration with sound designer Steve Colby gave him the chance to fill the house with great sonorities and not be concerned about covering singers. Brett Hodgdon prepared the lusty (if occasionally wobbly) BLO chorus well, but stage director Anne Bogart didn’t give them enough organized business.  From where we sat (orchestra M5), balances were often lopsided; the strings disappeared when the brass played, yet the excellent singing and playing gave us some great satisfaction and heartfelt moments. We can certainly recommend this production. Broadway is not likely to better it musically…but we won’t throw out our BluRay of the 1956 CinemaScope extravaganza.

Carousel is based on a 1909 play, Liliom, by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár, that was successful across Europe and then in New York. It attracted the interest of several notable composers who saw in the tangled lives of the lead characters the kind of raw emotions that make for stirring musical theater. Among them were Giacomo Puccini, Franz Lehar, George Gershwin and Kurt Weill. Molnár turned them all down, saying that he wanted Liliom to be remembered as his play and not somebody else’s opera. Late in life, having fled the Nazis, he granted the rights to R&H the day after seeing their Oklahoma!, then on Broadway.

Rodgers and Hammerstein shifted the play’s location from Budapest to the coast of Maine, but retained much of the story. Carousel transforms Molnar’s title character Liliom into Billy Bigelow, a man with few advantages in life, but gifted with charm and an outsized personality; like Liliom, he excels as a barker attracting young women to ride his carousel. Among them is Julie Jordan who longs for something more than the drudgery of her job in a cotton mill. When Billy lifts her onto the carnival ride, romantic sparks fly, though cautiously at first. Hammerstein captures their vortex of yearning in his inspired lyrics for their duet, “If I Loved You.” Rodgers matched him, composing one of his most haunting melodies ever.

Brandie Sutton made a warm, yet firmly assertive Julie. Thanks to generally judicious amplification, her rich soprano filled the house, giving full rein to the song’s immense power. Baritone Edward Nelson, as a muscular and tattooed Billy, responded in kind. In the music they make together it is possible to believe that things will work out well for them. Instead, though, the young lovers get caught into an inexorable downward spiral.

Both lose their jobs. Julie gets pregnant. Billy, who initially bridles at the responsibility of impending fatherhood, slowly warms to the idea even as he is gripped by his need for money so their child will not “grow up in slums with a bunch of bums like me.” In delivering Billy’s Soliloquy, Nelson movingly captures Billy’s anguished emotions especially in its final moments.

Soon after when his criminally scampish friend Jigger Craigin proposes that the two of them rob the mill owner, Billy agrees. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and Billy ends up killing himself.

Why does Julie love this man whom she tells us, hits her? Playwright Hammerstein provides no easy answers. Rather, he leaves the matter unresolved and lets the characters play out their lives with the hands they have been dealt. Julie sings with resignation, “He’s your fella and you love him, that’s all there is to that,” an aria more than a little reminiscent of Jerome Kern’s “Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.”

From the afterlife, a remorseful Billy is allotted one day to return and do something good for someone he loves. He meets his now 15-year-old daughter, Louise, and tries to connect with her but he bungles it. Yet ― and here the heartfelt sentimentality of Rodgers and Hammerstein shines as brilliantly as it ever did ― he manages to bring a small bit of grace to her life that has been overshadowed by having had a thief for a father. 

For a moment Julie thinks she sees Billy as he restates his undying love for her. She and Louise embrace a glimmer of hope that things will somehow get better for them. And as if to draw an emphatic line underneath that, R&H created as powerful an anthem to optimism as has ever been written with “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Even in an uncertain production like this, it is impossible to hear that part of the score, with Jamie Barton’s exquisite mezzo soaring above the chorus and orchestra, and not feel chills.

It’s a slim tale, and yet a deeply human one. At its heart are some of the most complex characters that Hammerstein ever created. Hence, it is unfortunate that his empathy for their condition, and the luminous lyrics he gave them have been so obscured in this BLO production.

Instead of exploring the interplay of the lives of fisherfolk, sailors, mill workers and townspeople in coastal Maine of the late 1800’s, director Anne Bogart has reset the action to unspecified time in an abandoned amusement park which she fills with Felliniesque characters in costumes that are bizarre and frequently distracting. Why have Jimi Hendrix, characters from Hair, and a man in a tiger suit wandering about? And who is that seeming prompter with a book who stands around rather aimlessly?

When Jamie Barton as Julie’s cousin Nettie Fowler joyously proclaims that “June is Bustin’ Out All Over,” she is wearing what looks like a straitjacket over an absurdly flouncy skirt. Barton sings thrillingly as attested by the audience’s warm response. But the full impact of the moment is diffused by the odd choices this production makes.

At the end of a long program note that I read hours after having left the theater, I learned that this production is about “a group of refugees arriving from a great distance to perform the play, seeking to gain access and acceptance.” Really? I missed that entirely, though I did wonder why two ICE-like uniformed guards frequently stood by the proscenium arch and why they opened and closed a chain-like fence at the front of the stage from time to time.

A major casualty of Bogart’s approach is the loss of any sense of continuity in the unwinding of Carousel’s complicated emotions. What should be dramatic moments in many cases are just moments. It is hard to develop empathy for her caricatures.

Anya Matanovič is one of Boston’s finest singers and a very capable actress. But here as Julie’s best friend, Carrie Pipperidge, her character’s humanity is stripped away as she spends the evening in a magenta tutu variously channeling Barbie and Mata Hari. She deserves better. Her rendition of “Mr. Snow” stirred us; she skillfully landed the tender, decades-old jokes Hammerstein wove into her lyrics, but Carrie Pipperidge rarely emerges from under the blond fright wig this production gives her.

Tenor Omar Najmi, made a strong impression as Mr. Snow from his first entrance (way upstage), so we regretted his subsequent downgrade from a human to a clown.

Markel Reed fully realized Jigger Craigin. He prowled the stage as if he owned it and projected a sense of danger that is palpable. He also delivered his mother’s admonition over “…stonecutters cut it on stone…there’s nothing so bad for a woman as a man who thinks he’s good.” in a marvelous head voice. With his swagger, resonant baritone and deft comic timing, Reed will make an excellent Billy Bigelow (or Leporello) someday.

In a cameo appearance as the Starkeeper near the end of the show was Lee Pelton, the former president of Emerson College, who once proposed repurposing the Colonial Theater into a student cafeteria before overseeing its revival as a fully functioning venue. He was suitably avuncular in this non-singing role as he handed out worthy advice to Billy from a ladder while hanging stars in the firmament.

In its early pre-Broadway versions, the show died in its last moments. Originally, Billy was brought into a traditional New England parlor to have his case reviewed by Mr. and Mrs. God. Despite Hammerstein’s fascinating attempt to inject a feminist aspect to the divine, the scene just did not work. In a televised interview years later with drama critic Elliot Norton, Rodgers recalled telling Hammerstein, “I don’t care what you do. Put him up on a ladder, but get him out of that parlor.” Hammerstein was thus inspired to write one of the most memorable scenes in the show.

Shura Baryshnikov capably contributed a range of choreography and movement (including a break dance number) for the large cast and a few professional dancers. Her work benefited from Richard Russell Bennet’s sumptuous orchestrations and Trude Rittman’s additional choral and dance scoring. “The Carousel Waltz” swirls and swells as much on Bennet’s orchestrations as on Rodger’s submitted tunes. Rittman, who had been working as an accompanist for choreographer Agnes de Mille for several years, created the score for the dance sequence for Louise in Act 2 at de Mille’s request. She also composed the dance arrangements as well as the underscoring for the dramatic scenes. Together, Bennet and Rittman fashioned Rodgers’ tunes into a soundscape that unifies the sometimes-disparate elements of the story. Neither ever received the full credit due them for their work on this and several other R&H musicals.

Sara Brown created a drab if atmospheric set with a collapsing roller coaster track wrapping the stage. The curtain remained fully raised throughout, the ropes in the flies were lighted (though no drops flew), and the playing area extended to the stage-house wall.

Lighting designer Brian Scott often, (but not always) bathed the theater’s gilded proscenium arch in a brilliant glow, often pin-spotting the central medallion and outlining the box fronts, balcony rails in strings of bare bulbs, in an effort, perhaps, to bring the carnival atmosphere onstage into the house, and indeed to profess his love for the theater; the bulbs chased in the manner of an amusement park ride at the end. He used colors to give interest to the drab set, but spectacularly drained the spectrum to antiseptic white light for Billy’s descent from the stars.

Angus had told BMInt readers in an interview [HERE] that amplification would only be used for spoken dialogue, but such was not the case. Despite sound designer Steve Colby’s best efforts to support Angus’s vision, the use of mikes was unsettling. This is opera. The voices should be able to fill the theater without microphones. Singers and actors spoke and sang on this stage for decades before amplification was introduced. They could be heard at the back of the second balcony. Shame on any current performer who lacks the proper training or pipes to do that. [It should be added that the Colonial is now fully carpeted, while in its glorious past that sound absorbent material only covered the aisles.] At one point a singer exited into the wings stage right, but her voice came out of the speaker on stage left. A couple of times singers overloaded their head mikes.

I commend BLO for bringing well-sung and well-played operas to Boston. In the end, it is the music that is important. Playing it straight without distracting directorial conceits might be a good policy for future productions.

The run continues through next weekend. Tickets and details HERE.

Stephen Landrigan is a former print journalist and concert presenter.