Rodgers and Hammerstein, meet Thornton Wilder.
Michael Michetti draws a line directly from Wilder’s Our Town (1938) to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945) in his Reprise revival of the latter, at Freud Playhouse.
In both plays, we’re in a small New England community. Carousel takes place in a coastal town with a factory, while Wilder’s play is set in an inland, rural village. The time frames are similar. Near the end of both plays, a newcomer to the afterlife is allowed to return briefly to the land of the living.
Of course all those similarities were already there in the texts. But Michetti also turns Carousel’s heavenly Starkeeper (M. Emmet Walsh) into an observer and narrator who’s very similar to the Stage Manager in Our Town. He reads from the stage directions in order to fill in missing scenic details. And he joins the action as the high school commencement speaker in the final scene, just as the Stage Manager becomes a soda fountain proprietor and a preacher in Our Town.
Alexandra Silber as Julie Jordan, Jane Noseworthy as Carrie
Tom Buderwitz’s scenic design is stripped down to simple New England woods. A rudimentary carousel emerges at its customary moment in the opening sequence - but it’s a pleasant surprise when it actually revolves. It looks as if it would be unable to muster enough centrifugal thrills for even an undemanding three-year-old.
Yes, Michetti’s asking us to exercise our imaginations. This should be easy for Reprise subscribers - the company is rooted in the principle of doing scenically simple versions of older musicals, after very little rehearsal time. But Michetti’s vision also jibes with Wilder’s emphasis on life’s basics, as well as with the austerity that’s prescribed (if not dictated) by today’s economy.
If all this rings a recent bell, it’s because director David Lee took the same approach to that other classic “Ca” musical, Camelot, at the Pasadena Playhouse. Buderwitz designed the sets for Camelot, too, using similar wooden structures, with none of the usual frills. Lee didn’t establish a particular Camelot character as a narrator, but he allowed several actors to directly address the audience with narration and a brief “story theater” framing device. He cut more of the script than Michetti did with Carousel, but then more of the Camelot script is obviously superfluous.
And so we have two classic musicals on L.A. stages, playing only through this weekend, in which bare-bones approaches not only fit today’s budgets but also bring satisfying aesthetic results. I’ve already discussed Camelot’s results. In the case of Carousel, the show’s universality grows as Michetti’s Our Town-like staging strips away much of the color palette and scenic particulars.
In fact, for those of us who are reminded of Our Town, that connection might even make the characters more sympathetic. A potential problem in Carousel is that the casually thoughtless wife-beater Billy Bigelow is not the kind of nice guy that, for example, George Gibbs is in Our Town. George and his mate Emily Webb probably resemble most theatergoers’ notions of themselves a lot more than Billy or even Julie do. Yet the audience weeps copious tears at the end of Michetti’s Carousel, perhaps more so than it would at the end of a comparable Our Town. The bond with these characters - at least as enacted by Robert Patteri’s Billy, Alexandra Silber’s Julie and their daughter (Kimberly Mikesell’s Louise) - is formidable.
I’d like to suggest that Reprise take a look at Allegro (1947), the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that followed Carousel. Although it isn’t set in New England, I’ve read that it was more consciously influenced by Our Town than was Carousel. I’ve seen it only once, in a 2002 concert reading by the Musical Theatre Guild (Reprise choreographer Lee Martino worked on it). Since then, Eric Schaeffer staged an Allegro at his Signature Theatre in Virginia, with a book adapted by Joe DiPietro and a cast cut to 14. It would be fascinating to see what Michetti or Lee or another creative director might do with it in an off-book production.
Allegro isn’t only a rarely seen experiment by America’s most famous musical theater team, but it also was the first professional production that Stephen Sondheim worked on, as a teenaged gofer. “I realize that I am trying to recreate Allegro all the time,” Sondheim later told biographer Meryle Secrest.
Maybe it’s considered too obscure to sell enough tickets, even within the length of one of Reprise’s short runs. Reprise presented a series of special events that were billed as a Rodgers celebration last fall, and I didn’t notice Allegro on the list.
The current Reprise season offers three oft-seen shows - Carousel, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. But Reprise occasionally offers a musical that’s truly seldom seen - I Love My Wife, Flora the Red Menace, No Strings. Dear Jason Alexander: If this part of Reprise’s mission hasn’t been forgotten, please add Allegro to the list of possibilities.
Carousel, Reprise at Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Westwood. Thurs-Fri, 8 p.m.; Sat, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 and 7 p.m. www.reprise.org. 310-825-2101.
Also closing this weekend is The Pee-Wee Herman Show. It’s much like an elongated episode of Paul Reubens’ former TV show, and its goal seems to be snagging another chance for a TV series - or a movie. So I hesitate to consider its merits as theater.
Still, I want to urge any other producers who might consider Club Nokia as a theatrical venue to please think twice. It’s a nightclub, with most of the fixed seating in the balcony, presumably so that the area next to the stage can serve as a dance floor. This is hardly a venue that honors the theatrical bond between performers and audience.
Club Nokia is in the L.A. Live area, once billed as our Times Square. The area needs at least one real theater if it’s going to live up to that nickname. Maybe when the economy is booming, someone might want to look again at the Variety Arts Center, a block away.
The Pee-Wee Herman Show, Club Nokia, 800 W. Olympic, L.A. Thurs, 8 p.m.; Fri, 7 p.m. and 10:15 p.m.; Sat, 4:30 and 8 p.m.; Sun, 4 and 7:30 p.m. www.ticketmaster.com, 800-745-3000.
Photo Credit: John Ganun
