Giant steps

Carousel dances into town

by Bill Rodriguez

Some musicals are appreciated for their songs, some for the tale they tell, some for a gimmicky hook such as roller-skating singers or actors dressed as cats. Carousel, coming to Providence Performing Arts Center May 14-20, is better known for its dancing than for its story.

Not that some of the songs didn't leave folks humming them decades later. The peppy "June Is Bustin' Out All Over," the stirring "You'll Never Walk Alone" and "If I Loved You" certainly are keepers.

Rodgers and Hammerstein followed their 1943 Oklahoma!, which transformed musical theater, with Carousel only two years later, when their ambitions for the genre were still piping hot. Oklahoma! was the first melding of story and score on stage since opera was created in 17th-century Florence. And it was the first musical in which dance helped advanced the plot.

Yet today's audiences would hardly appreciate the original Broadway version of Carousel. There were laughable incongruities of tone and content. As can be seen in the unwatchable 1956 film, the gloomy aspects crime and poverty were sugar-coated to go down pleasantly. Hitting women was portrayed to make us sympathize with the batterer rather than shudder a slapped woman became more noble when she responded with forgiveness, you see. How romantic.

The story takes place in 1873, in a New England village where the men are fishermen and the women work in the textile mill. Cocky carousel barker Billy Bigelow falls for poor Julie Jordan and reluctantly attempts to settle down. He can't, and when he turns to robbery he ends up dead. Fifteen years later, Billy is allowed to return to Earth for a day to accomplish one good deed, which he tries to do for his daughter Louise.

The musical was resurrected for a 1992 revival, and the difficult assignment was given to British director Nicholas Hytner (Miss Saigon, The Madness of King George). In the reconceived version that is currently on tour, he tried to make a more convincing blend of bitter and sweet than had been managed before. Hytner's Carousel opens in a gloomy textile mill instead of at the fairgrounds, so that we understand the kind of life these people escaped to there. We don't avert our eyes from the dark side of their lives, so the fun they have can come across as necessary rather than frivolous escapism.

A parallel task was taken up by choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, who kept coming back to this dark tone in reinventing the award-winning dances. Choreographer Agnes de Mille's original work, in both stage and film versions, were tough acts to follow. For example, while de Mille's lengthy dream ballet in Oklahoma! was a stunning departure for popular entertainment, her similar ballet in Carousel has been regarded as the greater esthetic success.

MacMillan, however, died a month before the revival's premiere in London. He did not see his work receive a Tony Award on Broadway, nor did he get to finish his job. His choreographic assistant Jane Eliott was recruited to design the final two dances. She spoke recently from London about that challenge.

Q: You were left to choreograph Louise's solo, one of the most emotionally crucial in the whole story. What choices did you make?

A: Well, when it happened it was a terrible time because Kenneth had just died, and the morning after he died was the morning that he was going to create that solo. So I went with Bonnie Moore, who was the original Louise, we went and looked at tapes. Ultimately I took out about four steps in various ballets of Kenneth which I felt would be good to use, for the mood of the piece.

I think the point about Louise's solo is you've got one minute to establish the heart and soul of that very mercurial, confused and hurt young girl. You need to understand her before you can move on, and that's what I tried to achieve in that solo. There are all these emotions passing through her.

Q: You knew that your work would be compared to that of not one but two great narrative choreographers. Did that inhibit you?

A: (laughs) I didn't think like that. I had something to do and I did it to the best of my ability. It's changed a bit since. With the different people doing Louise, sometimes I do little changes for them.

I wish Kenneth could have stayed alive and done it we'll never know what he would have done. But it's very tricky for me because, you know, it's like stepping into Kenneth's shoes, which is not at all what I would ever want to do.

Q: Most people are familiar with Carousel from the movie. How different is choreography for the stage and for the screen?

A: Well, I suppose you've got basic things like limitation of stage and set space. For example, in the movie you have an outside location and you can use a strong set. You've got people dancing on the roof and jumping off it and all that side of it. Theater is a completely different medium. I mean, theater is illusion, theater is creating an atmosphere within the confines of a stage and the artificiality of the stage set. So you've got a completely different mission, really. You've got to draw the audience in to believe what they're seeing, as opposed to seeing something that's believable.

Q: The choreography of Sir Kenneth MacMillan is radically different from de Mille's. How would you characterize the two styles?

A: I would say his is much darker, much more passionate. And . . . what would be the word? Kenneth had a desire to get beyond, be almost rude. He didn't care about the niceties, he wanted the real, raw quality. In his dark ballets, he doesn't care about the prettiness of the step, he wants to almost slightly shock sometimes. And I don't think Agnes de Mille had quite that, although she wasn't a traditional choreographer at all for her time.