The Stage

Caroline, or Change

Published Friday 20 October 2006 at 16:05 by Aleks Sierz

American musicals tend to hold up a bright mirror that reflects that land’s optimistic dreams. In Caroline, or Change, a new musical that started life in New York, a much darker picture emerges.

Set in a Louisiana backwater in November 1963 - the month that President Kennedy was assassinated - the story focuses on Caroline, an unhappy black maid who works in the Jewish Gellman household. The change in the title refers both to the growing Civil Rights movement and to the small change that the Gellmans leave in their pockets and patronisingly allow Caroline to keep.

Reprising her New York performance, Tonya Pinkins plays Caroline as a dignified but discontented matron, capable but clearly no stranger to pain. After holding back for half the evening, her climactic song blasts the audience into stunned amazement, magnificently dispelling any doubts that might linger about her portrait of a stoical black woman.

Perry Millward is both charming and convincing as Noah, the Gellmans’ vulnerable son whose conflict with Caroline provokes her final outburst. And, in George C Wolfe’s fluid, if darkly lit, production, it’s hard to fault the rest of the cast, led by Clive Rowe, Anna Francolini, Richard Henders and Hilton McRea. Pippa Bennett-Warner is particularly impressive as Caroline’s agile and energetic daughter and the musical’s hope for the future.

Brilliantly written by Tony Kushner, enjoyable to watch and highly emotional, with music by Jeanine Tesori that is both a tribute to, and a parody of, blues, soul, klezmer, classical and Motown, this is nevertheless an oddly nostalgic and hopeful look at the early sixties.