The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 97

Sunday, March 27, 1994 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Gil Musical revivals put an interpretive spin on some old favorites MUSICALS from G1 Carousel Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein 2d; music by Richard Rodgers; directed by Nicholas Hytner; choreography by Sir Kenneth MacMillan; sets and costumes by Bob Crowley. The cast Sally Murphy, Michael Hayden, Audra Ann McDonald, Shirley Verrett, Eddie Korbich, Fisher Stevens, Jeff Weiss, Sandra Brown, Jon Marshall Sharp. Playing at: Vivian Beaumont Theatre, 150 West 65th for an open-ended run. Tickets are $65. Information: vMm if the opening "Carousel Waltz" fills the auditorium, he directs our attention to a line of young women "weavin' at the loom," as a subsequent lyric will have it.

Their drab clothes are earth-colored, their movements mechanical, growing frenetic along with the waltz. Then, as a menacing overhead clock strikes 6, the women among them Julie Jordan, who will become Billy's wife, and her friend Carrie Pipperidge head for the carousel, which takes shape on the thrust stage. It is a wonderful effect, this carnival that emerges out of nowhere and then disappears when the waltz runs down, but the people who work in it are a seamy lot a pair of blowsy burlesque dancers, a musclebound "strong woman," a tatty Uncle Sam on stilts. There's nothing at all romantic about this sleazy, cacophonous freak show, and the fact that Julie and her friends think it so says worlds about the dreariness of their lives. If the carnival represents the reality of this Carousel, the next scene represents the dream, the myth.

As Julie and Carrie exchange confidences about the men in their lives, they do so on a moonwashed green mound, behind which a picket fence zigzags toward a little white church on a hill. The production will flip between these perspectives throughout its three hours. (If the mill owner, Mr. Bascombe, is especially harsh, you can count on the motherly Nettie Fowler to be especially warm and embracing.) But it never wanders far from the reality of things. This is particularly evident in its Billy Bigelow, played by Michael Hayden as a cocky, sullen young man with a perpetual chip on his shoulder, yet one whose anger can't disguise his need and fear.

He's clearly a kid, and so is the Julie Jordan of Sally Murphy, a spunky girl whom you quickly understand to be the stronger of the two. I've never seen the pair played so young, and the casting makes perfect sense. Neither Hayden nor Murphy is a Jigger is the no-goodnik who persuades Billy to attempt the robbery that gets him killed, and for much of the musical Hytner treats him as a figure of genuine evil, with his stringy hair, his black suit, his raspy voice and his pasted-on sneer. But in the second act, when he puts the moves on Carrie, the character is written as something of a comic villain (rather in the mold of Jud Fry in Oklahoma), and the director is stuck. At moments like this, Carousel just won't be a real drama, and there's nothing to be done but play along with the theatrical artifice and damn the inconsistency.

The more you dig for reality in a vintage musical, in other words, the more you run the risk of someone's asking just why these people are bursting into song and dance or just why, now and then, the sentimental words they sing seem at variance with the tough tone you're trying to project. (The words in this show, after all, are by Oscar Hammerstein, one of the theater's genuinely sweet practitioners.) In such instances, you're saddled with a basic ambivalence which may be why even the sets in this Carousel seem to be trying to cover more bases than they can manage. At one moment, they fill the stage and reduce the characters to insignificance; at the next, they trundle about like toy houses. At one moment, their skewed perspective is all tilts and angles; at the next, they resemble Thomas Hart Benton paintings. They project more moods than the production is prepared to deal with.

Despite these reservations, however, this is a Carousel against which all others are bound to be measured and I haven't even mentioned such inspired decisions as turning the Star-keeper and the rest of the gang in Heaven into New England Puritans. If it takes an Englishman to reimagihe an American musical in terms of our own social history, let's be glad that one was ready for the job. awaited production that originated ai London's Royal National Theatre, doesn't so much turn the show on its head as carry its implications to tjieir logical conclusions. Directed rjy Nicholas Hytner (Miss Saigon) with choreography by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, the show latches onto the social inequities implicit in the musical's book and shoves them front and cjenter. Its story isn't merely played out against its place and time a cbaStal New England town in 1873 burseems an inevitable product of them.

Nbt everything in this proletarian, decidedly un-gauzy production works, erf course, but even its misfires are ijisg-uctive. That's because Carousel is the-latest in a series of musical revivals hose aim is not just to get a show cjnjhe boards but to reinterpret it witi the tools of modern stagecraft 4ni the omniscience of hindsight. Even Guys and Dolls, which began Broadway's recent series of blockbuster revivals, has been recast not as a replica of the 1950 original but as a sly qomment on it a comic-strip version of a tongue-in-cheek caricature, This season we've had My Fair Lady, hich submerges memories of the Moss Hart-Cecil Beaton pastels-and-aVeam staging of 1956 in a surreal production that aims to restore some of the astringency and social commentary of the musical's source, Shaw's Pygmalion. We've had Damn Yankees, visual valentine to the 1950s in hich director Jack O'Brien threw cjut all but the outlines of the tepid 1955 book and rewrote it with dozens rjf period jokes, many of them funny cjnly through the prism of distance. And we're soon to have Grease, a Reworked version of the 1972 hit about Aerds and greasers in a 1959 high school.

Next season, most significantly, we'll get Show Boat, Harold Prince's frp-to-bottom refitting of the Jerome ern-Oscar Hammerstein 2d classic about life among blacks and whites on as Julie Jordan and Billy yet convincing. great singer (which the Carrie, Audra Ann McDonald, assuredly is), but in this conception they don't have to be. They do have to be actors, though, and they're all of that so much so that although he hasn't the lung power of the Raitts and MacRaes of Bigelows past, Hayden makes the soliloquy as convincing in its hope and ambivalence as any reading you could wish for. Kenneth MacMillan's choreography, staged by Jane Elliott (Sir Kenneth died during rehearsals for the show in 1992), sets the women to swirling in a cloud of white petticoats in "June Is Bustin' Out All Over," unleashes the men to literally stomp through a "Blow High, Blow Low" that seems fraught with danger, and most of all makes a spectacularly beautiful thing of the second-act ballet. This, you may recall, is the dance in which Billy and Julie's 15-year-old daughter, Louise (Sandra Brown), reprises her father's life in tandem with a carnival roustabout (Jon Marshall Sharp), and it is glorious from beginning to end.

The show runs just a bit long, to be sure (so much so that "The Highest Judge of All" has disappeared from the score), but that's among the lesser problems of this production, as is the vocally stunning but dramatically wooden Nettie of Shirley Verrett. The real problems may have to do with the concept itself, starting with the matter of Jigger Craigin. Carousel, which, in fact, began life as a play called Liliom, by the Hungarian Ferenc Molnar. In moving the location from Budapest to New England, Hammerstein and his new collaborator, Richard Rodgers, not only finessed a potential political problem (World War II was underway, and Hungary was on the side of the Axis) but built in such local color as a merry-go-round, a clambake and a spirited hornpipe. The shift in locale softened the story of Billy Bigelow's life and redemption, but it also rather misrepresented the kind of existence that people lived in the New England of 1873.

Hytner more than redresses the balance. As the familiar one-two-three of Another director debuts with a fine gangster film Rnr ft II. DIRECTORS from G1 Boyz the Hood, Mario Van Peebles' New Jack City, Allen and Albert lughes' Menace II Society and Carl ranklin's One False Move. They're $11 'striking debuts- by filmmakers who didn simply knock on Holly wood door. Like the hardened cops jvho stalk their movies, they kicked open.

Oh the surface, these feature bows Jnay suggest that the easiest road to Screen success is to lit erally blaze a trail. But hey do more than fuse dnetic violence with ligh quality and imagi-tation. What sets these works apart and has Attracted critical praise End eager offers from tajor studios is that their directors have Carlo from a region has been up by Carlei, poor of Italy, already snapped MGM. wealthy society that allows these social and political conditions to persist is deeply felt. Adults in the community are chastised for their failure to step in and help the lost younger generation, but the frustration and despair of the grown-ups are also emotionally acknowledged.

There are few more sobering scenes than the point in Menace II Society where Caine's friend O-Dog relives the killing of a Korean grocer by playing back the video from the store's security camera for the entertainment of his friends. If there is a moment to match that chili, it comes in One False Move (1992), when Pluto, a black psychopath with a genius IQ, calmly dispatches the guests at a family party hosted by a drug dealer. All of these films serve up action while still managing to raise the right questions. In New Jack City (1991), which Van Peebles opened with a shot contrasting the glittering skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan with the tenements of Harlem, Wesley Snipes plays Nino Brown, a drug dealer who is at least as smart as Pluto. When Brown is finally hauled into court, he reflects on his sophisticated distribution network.

None of it would have been possible without the faceless profiteers who live far away from Nino's world. Poppies don't grow in Harlem, he points out, nor are Uzis manufactured there. Nino may not be part of the solution, but, as he acidly notes, he's only a Sally Murphy and Michael Hayden, Bigelow in "Carousel, are young the Mississippi during four decades beginning in 1887. With a cast of 71 spilling over Eugene Lee's spectacular sets, the production is currently on view in a Toronto suburb and will move to Broadway in the fall. Undaunted by charges that Show Boat is inherently racist, Prince has created a tough, historically accurate panorama in which the subsidiary roles of the black characters implicitly speak to a sense of national shame.

And in establishing these fringe figures as the musical's conscience rather than as mere set decoration, he has jarred the show loose from its traditional moorings in operetta and made it a real play. That is what Hytner set out to do in When his family is slaughtered by a rival faction in the harrowing opening of Flight of the Innocent, Vito, played by Manuel Colao, runs for his life. Pursued by the police and the surviving kidnappers, who believe he knows where the ransom is stashed, Vito finds himself in the corner that Hitchcock loved to explore: He is trapped between hostile authority and homicidal pursuit. But Vito is only a kid, and Carlei exploits his innocence with a skill that turns his predicament into a substantive discussion of guilt and moral responsibility. That's something rarely encountered in action pictures, and it's a bond Carlei shares with African American filmmak ers Singleton, Van Peebles, the Hughes brothers and Franklin.

Vito comes to realize that the ransom is blood money, and to believe that his redemption lies in returning it to the victim's parents. The mother and father, of course, want their son not the money back. In the most poignant development in Flight of the Innocent, the mother, unhinged by grief, begins to look at Vito as a surrogate for the son whose loss she cannot accept. It's a long way from Rome to Harlem and Watts, but there's a kinship between Vito and the troubled adolescents who populate this decade's crop of urban-crime movies. Boyz the Hood (1991) and last year's Menace II Society are among the most extraordinary directing debuts in any genre in recent memory.

Tre, Doughboy and Ricky, the kids in Singleton's film, and Caine, whose troubles are searingly chronicled by the Hughes brothers, bring something new to the idea of coming of age. These young men don't worry about what they want out of life they worry whether they'll even make it out of their teens. In powerful, accessible terms, Boyz and Menace raise the question of responsibility inside and outside of the devastated communities and splintered families they portray in unsparing detail. The rage against a "ONE NIBBLE AND YOU'RE I HOOKED" 1 "Boyz the Hood," with Ice Cube (driving) and Cuba Gooding Jr. (right), was the acclaimed debut of John Singleton (glasses).

tin i AW" THE DUEL OF THE ACES In The Tennis Showdown Of The Century tiny part of the problem. In Reservoir Dogs (1992), his much-heralded arrival, Tarantino disdained layers and meanings of social justice that elevated the directing debuts of the black filmmakers. The very amorality of his brutal crime thriller is what makes it work so effectively. Tarantino, who is currently preparing Pulp Fiction, got the kind of debut reviews that film-school students dream about. His script, which follows the fallout from a botched jewel robbery in Los Angeles, was so corrosively cynical and brilliantly written that he attracted the likes of Harvey Keitel to his humble project.

That there is no honor among thieves has been the refrain of innumerable gangster movies. Tarantino tosses aside sequential storytelling and ranges back and forth over the planning, execution and aftermath of the heist. A vein of dark wit runs through his keenly observed, superbly acted and technically astonishing picture a tone set in the hilarious opening sequence in a diner, where the assembled hoods get mad at a guy too cheap to chip in his share of the waitress' tip. There's one tip these young directors would gladly contribute to filmmaking hopefuls: There's no such thing as a formula that can't be remixed, and the bad guys still offer the quickest access to Hollywood's fast track. JIMMY CONNORS RESORT the Fantasy Eound unusual things to do once the uspects are rounded up.

The violence and treachery are much the Same, but the viewpoint and treatment are refreshingly different, Carlei, whose film recently had a limited Philadelphia run, is the latest and perhaps unlikeliest addition io this lineup. Since the start of the (90s, several young African American ifilmmakers have distinguished jthemselves by chronicling life and tieath on the mean streets of Harlem pr South Central Los Angeles. But She 31-year-old Carlei who has already been snapped up by MGM and is making Fluke with Matthew Modine grew up in the tiny town jof Lamezia Terme in Italy's dirt-poor region of Calabria, All of these recent first-timers jhave technique to burn, and their ifilms brim with references to work by veterans such as Stanley Kubrick and John Huston, who made the all-time criminal debut with The Maltese Falcon in 1941. Fresh out of film school, with just a couple of short works to his credit, Carlei penned a script that focused on the predatory gangs that kidnap children of Italy's rich and often kill the victim to cover their tracks. But he put a different spin on the mate-(rial by telling his story through the 'eyes of a boy who happens to be the sort of one of the kidnappers.

JR 'I a mm tr? Ik uw-rnn in pumiiipwMMi it APRIL 27 AT 7PM APRIL 28 AT 7PM APRIL 29 AT 8PM APRIL 30 AT 2PM 8PM 1 HTM mmmmmmmm, I JOHN MC ENROE vs. "A fantastic humor, and joy-all without a sound. It's the most fun conceivable with a roll of toilet paper." -THE SACRAMENTO ENTERPRISES It's the point of no the duel of the devastating serve. See the master strokes of two of tennis's most colossal champions! Sunday, April 17 Mark G. Etess Arena Tickets: $35 $50 For tickets, call TlcketMaster at 1-800-736-1420, or stop by our box office.

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