Period piece

Opera North’s latest and most ambitious outreach project is a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which will end its tour with a month’s run from mid-August at the Barbican. The second performance in the Grand Theatre Leeds went down very well, and I’m sure that the whole run will be a great success.  My own fairly negative reaction seemed so discrepant that I have been watching and listening to various versions since, but with no more favourable reaction. The Opera North programme book, lavish but unhelpful, put my back up by quoting more than once an American critic’s assertion that ‘if it weren’t so enjoyable, one might be tempted to call it opera’. This is explicated in a note by the usually brilliant Ethan Mordden as ‘Carousel is like art, only better’, a defiantly meaningless remark. I don’t think Opera North is doing anyone a service, least of all itself, by distancing itself from its own identity.  

Waiving these general considerations, though, what about the work, insofar as one can watch and listen to it without the thick, hot mists of sentimentality that billow round it? Its most famous melodies —‘June is bustin’ out all over’, ‘What’s the use of wond’rin’?’, ‘If I loved you’ and ‘You’ll never walk alone’ — have become detached from their home in an unusual way. And I think that one of the reasons they have, apart from their undeniable catchiness, is that they don’t belong in the first place to any particular character, and could be sung by almost any of the characters. In this respect they are like ‘Nessun dorma’ and not like ‘Che gelida manina’. None of them expresses an individual’s particular qualities, it’s just that the show needs a good tune quite often and almost always gets one.

In between there are long stretches of desperately banal dialogue, as might be found in the cheapest 1940s B-movies, delivered in Leeds for the most part in tolerable imitations of American accents, though often slurred.