Word: carousels
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...Theater: Carousel tarnishes Broadway's Golden...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...