April 09--Will "Carousel," which opens Saturday night, be the first of the Lyric Opera of Chicago spring musicals to transfer to Broadway? Revivals being high-risk endeavors, it would have to be a really nice clambake over on Wacker Drive for that to happen. The show's director, Rob Ashford, bats away such speculation with the usual "we're doing it for here" answer. Still, certain stars seem to be aligning. Literally. First and foremost is a cast of a significantly higher profile than the playbill for the previous two years of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musicals at the Lyric. More notable, the cast includes several performers for whom these roles look like logical next steps in their careers. Which is presumably why many of these Broadway players are spending April in Chicago with the full blessing of their agents.
Take, for example, Laura Osnes, who plays Julie Jordan: "She has played enough Cinderellas and Sandys, and now she is ready for this," Ashford said in a recent interview. "She wants the next step."
Or Steven Pasquale: "He knows he has a Billy Bigelow in him," Ashford said. "He's ready."
Then there's Denyce Graves, a crossover opera star who is playing Nettie Fowler, often a throwaway role that here is being given some new focus at the core of the story. "It makes sense for Denyce to be expansive as Nettie," Ashford said. "Don't forget she is the character who ushers in spring. She starts off 'You'll Never Walk Alone.' It all works."
And consider Charlotte D'Amboise, a distinguished name in Broadway circles known especially for her work in Chicago's notorious namesake musical. At the Lyric, she's playing Mrs. Mullin, usually the villain of the piece and the main blocking character when it comes to the romance between the carnival barker Billy and the mill girl Julie. That's a heck of a name in a typically thankless role. But Ashford has thought anew about this character, too, and argues she needs to be a credible love interest, not an old crone. "Really, Mrs. Mullin should be the woman Billy is supposed to be with," Ashford says. "Julie has to be a surprise for him."
Then there's the matter of timing, which feels right. Despite the beloved nature of the title, "Carousel" has not been revived on Broadway since the imported British show by Nicholas Hytner in 1994. That is mostly because the Hytner production, which later played the Rosemont Theatre and later yet I saw copied in productions all over the map, was so darn good as to scare everyone else away. That particular production -- etched still on my mind after several viewings -- featured a set by Bob Crowley that picked up the mystical New England elements of the story. Ashford, who says he was also a huge fan, noted that the key to the production was a kind of Puritan sparseness: a moon, a carousel, a church, a mound of earth, a rocky shore. It was a world of workers, all praying for love.
Clearly, the next "Carousel" to gain international attention will have to have a completely different visual key, and that is what Ashford clearly has in mind. He is using an Italian set designer named Paolo Ventura, whose theatrical work nobody in Chicago or New York ever has seen before, for the simple reason that there has been no prior theatrical work for anyone to see. He has never designed for the theater. Ashford came across Ventura's artwork in a gallery in Chelsea (the exhibit included a miniature carousel), near where Ashford lives in New York.
The director became entranced and persuaded the Lyric to bet on a neophyte designer. There were consultations and experiments in Italy, and the resultant sets are intended to evoke, Ashford says, "a tragedy with hope."
"Ventura's work is very beautiful but also very melancholy," Ashford said. "It is as if there is a weight hanging on everything we are seeing. The idea is that the design parallels the emotions of the story."
Story, for the record, is crucial in "Carousel" -- surely no show in the venerable producing history of the Lyric will ever have featured less singing.
That may sound like a strange description of one of the most beloved of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, the show that contains such incomparable musical numbers as "You'll Never Walk Alone," "If I Loved You," and, most notable of all, "Soliloquy," one of the hardest songs to sing in any musical, anywhere. And, indeed, the Lyric will have 37 musicians in its vast pit playing the original orchestrations.
But "Carousel" has far more scenes -- often two-person scenes -- than "Oklahoma" and "The Sound of Music" and rather fewer musical numbers. Of all these masterpieces, "Carousel" surely is the darkest, the most brooding, the most emotional.
Intimacy thus will be crucial -- whatever the size of the stage, whatever stage this show may eventually occupy.
"Carousel" opens Saturday and runs through May 3 at Lyric Opera, 20 N. Wacker Drive; 312-827-5600 or lyricopera.org.
cjones5@tribpub.com
