This Carousel Doesn't Go Anywhere

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

For nearly two years a half-century ago, the original version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel played across the street from their original Oklahoma! To most devotees of musical theater, that era seems like heaven. It is obligatory among the ardent to deride today's Broadway blockbusters as vastly inferior to the hits of yesteryear and to cry out, If only they made 'em like they used to. To me, the Broadway opening last week of a revival of Carousel prompts the thought: Thank God they don't. I'd far rather see Miss Saigon for a fifth time, or Les Miserables for a ninth or even return to The Phantom of the Opera than ever again sit through the longueurs of Carousel, however pretty its candy-box score.

The production comes from London's Royal National Theatre, and won four Olivier Awards, equivalent to the Tonys. At New York City's Lincoln Center, the look and style are the same, but the cast is all American and almost all new, save for Michael Hayden, 30, a 1992 Juilliard graduate who reprises the leading role that vaulted him from nowhere to stardom.

There's little wrong and much beguilingly right with the staging by Nicholas Hytner, who also mounted the grandiose Miss Saigon and the brooding The Madness of George III, and who draws on both styles here. From a leaf-strewn greensward on a hill to a steepled white church in the twilight distance, from the island dunes of a clambake to the fairground fantasy of the title, this production entrancingly conjures iconic places of bygone mill-town New England with expressionistic verve and cinematic speed of transition. The actors are adequate, save for irksome mugging by the chorus, and the singing is mostly fine, with opera diva Shirley Verrett gloriously belting the score's two standards, June Is Bustin' Out All Over and You'll Never Walk Alone. The dances by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, who died during rehearsals, are bold and lively, although they bring the storytelling to a halt. The race-blind casting, if historically inaccurate, does not jar because this is clearly a fable.

What is wrong with Carousel is Carousel. The book is a mess. After a leisurely opening extravaganza, it brings together two discontented and penniless youths who quit their jobs and upend their lives to satisfy a moment of sexual curiosity. Within minutes the pair are rocketed into abiding love. Then the hyperkinetic narrative is suspended for about 20 minutes to accommodate a folksy dance number and a comic song in which the only joke is that a fisherman smells like fish. The action alternates between aimless divertissement and melodrama for an overblown three hours. At the end, the central character -- a petty crook named Billy Bigelow (Hayden) who kills himself rather than face capture by the police -- returns to earth as a prospective angel to save his adolescent daughter from a fate like his own. The girl's only apparent sin is to dance sexily in a ballet that implies the loss of her virginity. The father-savior doesn't say anything meaningful to his child. He just leaves a star that presumably symbolizes religious faith. The daughter is thereupon declared magically transformed, with no more evidence of her new goodness than of her old badness.

Carousel sentimentalizes the redemptive power of parenthood for Billy, a pettish, self-pitying idler and punk whom Hayden plays with an early-Brando sneer. Becoming a father may not make an abusive husband saintly; it often just gives him a new victim to pummel. A compelling actor, Hayden is not enough of a singer -- he loses his way rhythmically and sounds faint in the score's one modernist number, the anthemic Soliloquy ("my boy Bill"), which ends the first act. Sally Murphy is too bland to evoke sympathy as Billy's doormat of a wife, who can't see she's better off without him until after he's dead.

The music in Carousel is lovely but corny. Anyway, the essence of a book musical is the book. Hammerstein's protege Stephen Sondheim has said even the best musicals have a life of a few decades. Carousel is proof: it's stale.