SPLIT PERSONALITY
Stratford’s Rodgers and Hammerstein double bill divides.
Carousel
Avon Theatre, Stratford
The Sound of Music
Festival Theatre, Stratford
The two musicals at this year’s Stratford Festival are both from the canon of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and they contain the two most famous of the team’s inspirational songs. They affect me differently — the songs, that is, though it’s true of the shows as well. “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” from The Sound of Music, bores me to metaphorical tears. “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” from Carousel, moves me to real ones.
Both songs are stately admonitions, but there’s motion and development in “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” hits a bullying note at the start and then repeats it, pausing only to raise its voice when it gets to the bridge. Lyrically, it’s weirdly removed from the situation it’s supposed to be addressing. The heroine faces the dilemma of whether to return to her job as a governess and face the employer with whom she’s fallen in love. She needs career counselling, not generalized instructions about mountaineering and stream-crossing. Even in the reprise at the end, when she and her new family are escaping their native Austria by way of the Alps, they are only climbing one mountain. And according to the actual Maria von Trapp, asked in later years to comment on the show and the film, it’s the wrong one.
The sentiments of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” are generalized too, but the song is introduced as a pre-existing hymn, one that Nettie, the singer, seizes on to comfort and strengthen her cousin Julie, who has just lost her husband Billy Bigelow who fell on his own knife rather then be arrested for robbery. Nettie cares; the music tells us so. And because of the music, here and throughout the show, we care too.
In 1992 Nicholas Hytner directed a revolutionary production of Carousel at the National Theatre in London. Asked what was so special about it Mary Rodgers, the composer’s daughter, summed it up perfectly by saying “it starts in the mill.” In all previous productions it had started in the fairground, site of the carousel itself. Here, to the slow, laborious opening strains of the “Carousel Waltz,” Julie and her fellow mill girls were seen working, then packing up, in their dark if not quite Satanic workplace. Then, as the music picked up its exhilarating heart-stopping speed, the fair took shape before our eyes. We knew immediately why Julie craved escape, why she would find the carousel, and especially its barker Billy, so liberating. A new production faces an impossible choice: to ignore the Hytner revelations and seem wilfully old-fashioned, or to reproduce them and seem like a copycat.
Susan H. Schulman’s Stratford staging splits the difference. She starts in the mill, but with the girls lining up to get their wages. Then she assembles the fair and its inhabitants, a fairly conventional parade of stiltwalkers, bearded ladies and roustabouts It isn’t as thrilling as the National production but it still makes the pulse race. The same goes, shortly afterwards, for what might be called the big conditional love duet, “If I Loved You,” and the extensive dialogue that surrounds and augments it. It doesn’t generate the erotic heat that would make Billy’s and Julie’s union feel inevitable, but it’s well acted and very well sung.
The singing throughout is in fact the best I remember in any Stratford musical, as befits this show’s exceptionally rich score. Every song is a beauty, from the sly and joyous “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” down to an apparent throwaway like the mocking “Stonecutter Cut It on Stone.” The acting, with a couple of exceptions, is fine as well. Alexis Gordon glows as Julie, contemplative and enduring, and Jonathan Winsby captures the bitterness, the anger and the pain of Billy as well as, in the showpiece “Soliloquy,” the short-lived joy of his impending fatherhood.
He can’t quite bring off the impulsive suicide, nor the posthumous redemption of his return to earth to help his daughter; the production doesn’t give either of these scenes its proper weight. But it sharply points up the contrast between the impulsive coupling of Julie and Billy, and the respectably drawnout courtship of Julie’s friend Carrie (Robin Evan Willis delightfully bubbling) and her ambitious fisherman Mr. Enoch Snow (Sean Alexander Hauk, delightfully staid, and blessed in the second act with an Enoch Jr. who actually resembles him). Alana Hibbert has all the supportive warmth and vocal strength for Nettie, and Evan Buliung is magnetic as Billy’s evil genius Jigger, crossing back and forth between endearing rogue and outright sociopath. Michael Lichtefeld’s choreography is invigorating, and excellently executed, apart from some aimless chasing around in “This Was a Real Nice Clambake”; the second act ballet seems closely modelled on the classic Agnes de Mille original, though the Avon stage rather cramps its style.
The Sound of Music, as you may have gathered, has never been one of my favourite things, and Donna Feore’s production, though superficially glossier than Schulman’s Carousel, does little to reconcile me to it. With its seven singing siblings, from strapping to diminutive, the show has an inescapable cuteness quotient, but Feore magnifies it; in a musical famous, or notorious, for its lack of dancing, she sends the big and little Trapps scampering all over the furniture every chance she gets. The instant singing lesson of “Do Re Mi” is hard enough to swallow without it turning into a dancing class as well. Additional prancing comes from a chorus of domestics who seem to have been imported from My Fair Lady, and by a quartet of cowboys, initially reminiscent of last year’s Crazy for You but later let loose on a routine closely related to the Monty Python fish-slapping dance. The one legit song-and-dance number, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen," was spoiled on the first night by the visible shaking of the onstage gazebo every time the two hoofing juveniles came in contact with it, and also perhaps by our unavoidable foreknowledge that the boy is an incipient Nazi, an irony with which the show-as-written never quite comes to grips.
Hammerstein, at least, probably wanted to. There’s a number in the second act, “No Way To Stop It,” which suggests the show he might have written if left to his own devices. (This is the only R&H musical for which he didn’t write the book as well as the lyrics, and it shows.) It’s about accommodation in the face of tyranny, in this case the Nazi invasion of Austria; it almost foreshadows Cabaret. There in the middle of it is Ben Carlson’s Captain von Trapp, subtly but firmly registering his disgust with his egotistically amoral companions. Earlier, he has furnished the evening’s one truly moving moment, when the sound of his singing children (the kids, I have to say, are better than all right, musically and dramatically) awakens him to everything he has been missing, and he breaks into a hushed, gentle reprise of the title song. This is a superb performance that does justice to the captain’s initial ridiculousness, to his vulnerability, and to his integrity. This tender Trapp is the only performance that isn’t delivered in capital letters.
That includes Stephanie Rothenberg’s “Maria,” certainly lively and well sung and defying tradition, or at least Julie Andrews, by launching into her opening number flat on her back. But there’s no doubt in her, and hence no development; when she sings “I Have Confidence” she seems to believe it. As the Mother Abbess, Anita Krause sings her mountaineering anthem lustily, while scorning such acting niceties as occasionally looking at the person she’s supposed to be singing it at. Michael Gianfrancesco’s set does double duty as nunnery and stately home without convincing as either, but comes into its own when transformed into a music festival arena. Peter Hutt is impressively nasty as the arch-collaborationist, who pays the price of his perfidy by having to deliver such an oddly bi-lingual line as “there’s going to be an Anschluss,” which just about takes care of the show’s political content.
For all that’s supposed to be going on in the background, very little seems to be at stake emotionally. That’s what makes it so slight compared to its creators’ major work. It’s the only famous R&H musical in which nobody dies, and almost the only one in which love isn’t thwarted or unspoken. There’s no room here for an “If I Loved You” or for the heartbreaking realization that there had been no “if ” about it. In The Sound of Music nobody loses. Maybe that’s why it’s so popular.
The instant singing lesson of ‘Do Re Mi’ is hard enough to swallow without it turning into a dancing class