REVIVAL: CHARLES NEWELL'S CAROUSEL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

By Steven Scarpa
Public Relations Manager

Every theatre person has a story to tell about how their intoxication with the stage got started - a flash from childhood, a performance so indelible that it thrust them towards a life in the arts.

Charles Newell, artistic director of the Court Theatre in Chicago and director of Long Wharf Theatre's production of Carousel, was about 8 years old when he was struck by theatrical lightning. "My earliest transformative theatrical experience was in Washington, D.C., at Arena Stage," Newell recalled.

Robert Prosky was playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and Newell's mother, a subscriber, decided to take her son to the theatre that day.

"At the end of the piece - now, I obviously wasn't bringing a lot of life experience to it - but, at the end, I was weeping. I was overcome. Going to the theatre meant having a very strong emotional experience," he said.

Thanks to the help of several extraordinary teachers and a single-minded commitment to the craft, Newell has devoted himself to classic theatre and musicals.

His re-examination of famous musicals - an effort to strip them of the gloss of decades of productions and return them to a purer state - yielded Long Wharf's Man of La Mancha and his Court Theatre production of Guys and Dolls, among others.

Newell believes that Carousel - indeed all of the major American musicals he has re-examined - deserves the status of a classic text, similar to Uncle Vanya or The Glass Menagerie, for example. So he does a lot of historical research when tackling one of these works, studying source material and trying to get a sense of what the creators intended.

"We want to find the spark that inspired these artists to make this piece of theatre in the first place," Newell said.

For example, Newell's research noted that Carousel owed as much to Fritz Lang's 1934 film version of Liliom as it did to Ferenc Molnar's play of the same name. The film is black and white, conveying a gritty feel that early productions of Carousel mirrored.

People whose only experience with Carousel is through the colorful Shirley Jones/Gordon MacRae 1956 film are sure to be surprised by the piece's dark undertones, he said.

"What the initial intent of the artists who created the piece was and what the subsequent productions and cultural identity of it became are two different things," he said.

Newell and Doug Peck, the production's music director, have been in careful collaboration with the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation in an effort to preserve the sweeping scope of the work while creating an intimate reinterpretation of some of the songs.

Peck has readjusted the swirling, epic sound of the original orchestrations to be based around a string quartet. This de-amplification of the work and an adjustment of some tempos created an intimacy within the piece - songs occur out of heightened feeling and are extensions of the spoken word in Peck's re-orchestrations.

"It has been a terrific collaboration with them," Newell said. "Their responsibility is that the beauty and the glamorousness of the music be preserved."

Newell believes that Carousel continues to have cultural resonance. In a world where people are increasingly enveloped by a cocoon of screens and headphones, Carousel offers an antidote to isolation and individualization.

"The play is about the glorious preciousness of each other," he said. "Audiences will recognize that one of the great things and one of the most precious things is each other."