In a recent interview with Playbill.com, director Jack O'Brien talks about some of his decisions for the production.
http://www.playbill.com/article/stage-directions-why-a-decades-long-connection-to-carousel-led-jack-obrien-to-direct-the-2018-broadway-revival
How he got involved:
“I don’t know that it was something I wanted to direct. It popped up on [producer] Scott Rudin’s extraordinary radar, and he happily thought of me. But what he couldn’t know was that I had made my stage debut at the University of Michigan in 1959 as Mr. Snow in Carousel and it was a seminal moment in my life, because even though I had no ideas of continuing as a performer, it set the [need] deep in my throat and I never could shake it. Not so much just Carousel but the whole industry. I think that was probably the turning point in the early part of my life. I suddenly realized I was sunk. I belonged to this profession in some capacity, and I was going to have to work it out.
“Coming back to it many years later it was a great gift—a glimpse in a rear-view mirror I do not possess. I never really think of what’s past but only what’s in front of me. It forced me to look back over these years and these assignments and this remarkable career and take stock. It was great to embrace it and also learn to respect a new sensitivity, because our time is very different from 1945. And the issues are very different, and we had to listen with our ears to the ground to the heartbeat of this piece very carefully.
The Starkeeper:
“[Because it’s about redemption,] I focused very strongly on the latter third of the show, which is when Billy goes to heaven. I wondered why the Starkeeper was so lenient with him, why the Starkeeper gives him chance after chance to redeem himself when, in fact, he’s been a complete asshole through most of the evening. And I chose to keep the Starkeeper in the action from the very beginning of the show quietly through it, and you’re aware of him, so when Billy gets to heaven you know exactly who the Starkeeper is, and it actually balances the drama in a very interesting way.”
Cutting that famous line:
“[Director] Nicholas Hytner is a dear friend of mine, and he had said about his great [1994 Broadway] production, that he should have cut that line—the famous line, ‘It’s possible for somebody to hit you very hard and not hurt you at all.’ He said he didn’t know why he didn’t cut it. Well, we did cut it. And the thing is the intensity, the crime itself, the ineffable hurt on both sides of the ledger are even more readily accessible if you don’t point it up than if you did point it up. The connection is absolutely visceral, and you get it, but it doesn’t hammer it out. And you feel for everybody. We learned a great deal about editing, about thinking of our entire audience and trying to see the show from their perspective but not in any way interfere with the greatness of the piece itself.”
Updated On: 5/29/18 at 03:19 PM
