SHARON’S SIMPLY A MAID IN HEAVEN AS SWEET CAROLINE
SHARON D. CLARKE, who plays the maid named in the title of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical Caroline, Or Change, will be joined by some new faces when rehearsals start on Monday for the transfer from Chichester to Hampstead.
The show — about how parenting, race, religion, money and the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy intersect in Louisiana — begins performances at Hampstead on March 12.
New cast members include Naana Agyei-Ampadu, Carole Stennett, Sharon Rose, and T’Shan Williams
I saw productions at New York’s Public Theater and at the National, but I was struck by how director Michael Longhurst staged it in West Sussex and was knocked out by the power Ms Clarke invested in Caroline.
Adam Speer, the executive producer at the Ambassador Theatre Group, told me that the show at Chichester was ‘one of the most exciting, timely and beautiful productions’ he saw last year, which is why AGT is putting what he called ‘enhancement’ money into the Hampstead move.
The hope is that if Caroline takes off in North London, it will move to the West End.
Speers observed that the show is ‘timely’. One lyric, ‘an orphan ship of state drifting driverless’ refers to Kennedy’s death, but ‘drifting driverless’ could allude to Donald Trump.