The English National Opera has said that to keep going it needs to feature, alongside opera, musicals with big names. Partnership with Michaels Linnit and Grade has given us Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel in Sweeney Todd and Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard. Now here is CarouselCarousel, with Alfie Boe and Katherine Jenkins as the leads. It may bring in money and a different audience, but Lonny Price’s production is not going to do much for the musical.
Rodgers and Hammerstein created something rich and complicated when in 1945 they adapted Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom. Moving the action from Budapest to Maine (clam-bakes! sailors!), they drew on the sinister jollity of the carousel, and fused a lush score with a bleak story. The numbers soar: If I Loved You, June is Bustin’ Out All Over, Mister Snow. Fortunes plummet: an on-stage suicide, a widow, a bullied child.
You’ll Never Walk Alone can hardly fail to thrill, but it is hardly a promise: most characters are under threat. The heroine gets a violent husband; her best friend gets a bore. This is scarcely the only time that women-beaters have yielded beautiful songs: step up Nancy from Oliver! – and was Zerlina in Don Giovanni asking for it with “Batti, batti…”? Still, surely Carousel is alone in showing the quieter bullying of the complacent chap who squashes wife and nine children with self-importance.
As the squasher and near-squashee, Gavin Spokes and Alex Young are the liveliest characters on stage. Boe and Jenkins sing strongly. They are fine if you close your eyes. But where is the acting? Jenkins is pleasant but bland. And too genteel: it is impossible to imagine her – or anyone around her – working in a mill. It is hard to see what she sees in Boe, and she doesn’t look sure of that herself. Boe is completely stiff, holding his arms like a penguin. In common with nearly everyone else, he looks as if he has been plonked down, and is merely waiting for the cue to burst into song.
A 40-piece orchestra and chorus put swelling sound under the action. But not enough to make most of the dance sequences look other than, well, routines. Those tars in their caps and braces doing stamping as they roar: they are telling us who they are, but not expressing what they are like. “Semi-staged” is how this production is described. A euphemism for “not all there”.
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