Review by William Marshall
Of all the shows that have established themselves as standard repertoire for societies such as the Longwood Amateurs, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel is one of the few (West Side Story is another) that can truly match opera for musical ambition and emotional heft.
You can quite easily imagine Verdi or Puccini having a go at this slice of small-scale tragedy, although they might have baulked at the rather sentimental conclusion in which his guardian angel allows bad boy Billy Bigelow to revisit earth and witness his daughter’s high school graduation.
But although its dialogue is spoken rather than sung, this musical has an operatic texture, seamlessly woven with long and flowing songs that advance the story and capture the emotional state of the characters.
This must make it challenging to stage, but producer Colin Harris, stage director Chris Brearley and musical director Adam Boniface have done a first rate job here. In the role of Billy, Andrew Bailey sings excellently with long lines of melody sustained quite beautifully. Also, his body language and pugnacious bearing bring out the character of the fairground barker who behaves appallingly to his wife Julie (well acted and sung by Holly Comber-Moccia) and yet has a redemptive streak in him somewhere.
The staging is very attractive with a sequence of sets and backdrops that evoke an idyllic, early 20th Century New England coastal community. This Yankee Arcadia is invaded by a serpent in the shape of the feckless and frustrated Billy, egged on to an act of desperation by the villainous Jigger Craigin (Adam Thornton).
The counterpart to Julie’s predicament is the amusing bourgeois respectability of her friend Carrie and her pompous but successful husband Enoch Snow (a sparky Zoe Clarkson and a mutton-chop whiskered Richard Armstrong); while common sense and communal compassion are provided by Nettie Fowler (Becky Sutcliffe, who sings very strongly).
Most of the chorus work is all-female, which makes the show particularly mellifluous and the choreography by Lynn Clarkson is very effective. It includes a full-on ballet sequence featuring Billy’s daughter Louise (Lucy Crossley), which is very well done, although you have to work hard at the full significance of it.
The show’s most famous song, You’ll Never Walk Alone, jumps rather too far over the fence into sentimentality, but much of the other music is very moving, such as Billy and Julie’s rapturous If I Loved You duet, one of several musical highlights in a production that is well worth seeing.
It runs at the LBT until Saturday, when there is also a matinee.
