Theatre: Caroline Or Change



I received a bit of flack this week from an anonymous poster connected somehow to the West End production of Cabaret saying I was such a bitch for what I wrote about Cabaret and that I should stick to watching Daddy Cool or some other jukebox musical as that would be all my intelligence could cope with. Those creative types can get so touchy...

Anyway, I had already bought tickets to see Caroline Or Change for Thursday evening so I couldn't take them up on their suggestion. I had been looking forward to this for some time. Listening to the Broadway Cast Recording over the past couple of years it has grown on me to be one of my favourite musicals of recent years. With a book and lyrics by Tony Kushner (who also wrote Angels in America) and music by Jeanine Tesori (who wrote the musicals "Violet" and "Twelfth Night" and the new music for "Thoroughly Modern Millie" when it was adapted for stage) it received raves when it opened and the UK production has similarly received glowing reviews since opening.

Set in Louisiana where "Nothin' ever happens" just after the Kennedy assassination in 1963, it covers a period of small changes and bigger impacts that flow from them. Caroline is a black maid in a Jewish household. Noah, a young boy in that household, keeps leaving small change in his pockets and his step mother wants to teach him a lesson by letting Caroline keep all the change in his pockets. Caroline is a sad and lonely figure, but she escapes into her own world of work as a maid in the basement doing laundry where the washing machine, the radio and the dryer come to life. Her life is the music of the day so the score is peppered with soul, blues and rock and roll music set to the mundane and banal world that she is living in. This a world where money, loss and disappointment in life rule the day. Her daughter and her friend Dotty are moving with the times, but Caroline is resisting everything that is happening around her.

The drama builds to a series of climaxes that culminate in the performance of the above song "Lott's Wife" which has to be the most exciting thing I have seen on stage. Sitting where I was - merely a few metres away from Tonya Pinkins (reprising her role from Broadway and seen in the above clip) - you couldn't help but be blown away. The rest of the cast in this production were equally fabulous, and the singing in this production was particularly good. Pippa Bennett-Warner as Caroline's daughter Emmie was great and I also liked Malinda Parris as the washing machine who gave wet sudsy clothes such sex appeal...

For a musical some serious themes were being dealt with here. Race, poverty, consumerism, grief, anger, loss and disappointment. But at the heart of this show with its focus on two families was a story of hope and optimism. A new direction for an old genre called musical theatre if there ever was one...

Popular posts from this blog

Opera and full frontal nudity: Rigoletto

Image
David McVicar's oddly modern production of Rigoletto is back at the Royal Opera House . This modern and minimalist dark production has evolved over the years. It is better lit now but there is still an orgy and full frontal nudity within the first thirty minutes. This enables anyone not in the stalls an excellent view of a flaccid penis and a nicely shaved bush. But as time goes it seems more and more superfluous to the main focus of this tragedy of a court jester who seeks revenge. Here is hoping that the production continues to evolve... Conductor John Eliot Gardiner keeps the music well paced. Dimitri Platanias in the title role sounded great and received a rapturous applause for his interpretation of the role. You get a sense more of the doting father rather than the court jester or cursed man here. Vittorio Grigolo plays the Duke and sounds too lovely to be the cad the role calls for, but it is hard not to like when he is on stage anyway. And it is easier to understan
Read more...

Mostly harmless caper: Corpse! @parktheatre

Image
In times of national crisis, there is nothing like a good old fashioned comic murder-mystery to take your mind off social distancing and voluntary isolation. Or perhaps a silly murder-mystery. And even if the story is a bit suspect, Corpse! is mostly harmless fun and staged with a lot of panache and energy by Tom York. It's currently playing at the smaller space of the Park Theatre . Set against the backdrop of another national crisis, Edward VIII's abdication, Gerald Moon's Corpse! (complete with an exclamation point) was first seen in the early eighties. It is about two identical twins who despise each other. The oldest (by a few minutes) Evelyn, is poor and living in a squalid Soho flat. His acting career hasn't progressed much after being accused of poisoning cast members. He gets by shoplifting from Fortnum and Mason and promising favours to his lonely landlady. His younger brother Rupert is incredibly rich after inheriting the family fortune. Evelyn has dec
Read more...

Nights and boos with @johnnyfoxlondon

Image
  Londonist head theatre critic JohnnyFox recently passed away after a short illness. Over the years we went to the theatre together. For me I was covering it for my own blog. For John it was covering it for countless online magazines and eventually Londonist. We rarely took notes. There was one point when John tried to do that. But when he went to the bathroom, I wrote in his note pad, biscuits, milk, a tin of meat for the cat. Instead, we would talk about the show on the way home. If we liked the show enough, we would record the banter on the Audioboo platform (as it was then called). While we assumed only my mother was listening, it was an opportunity  to explain why we liked something, without too many pauses or ums and errs. We also travelled to Winchester and Poole to speak to young people starting out as journalists about how to make a living doing it. The point we made was that theatre journalism never made money but you should do it because you like to do it around your
Read more...