What was it about Caroline or Change?

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 3:34pm

For someone who didn't see it and knows very little about it...

What about it made it such a landmark show? Was it better than the critics said? How did the real audiences feel? What did you all think about it?

[GYPSY1527]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:02pm

It's so hard to put into words. When I first saw this question, my intial response was "It was real". By real, I literally mean that how Tonya portrayed the character and how everyone acted was down-right honest and real. There were no pretenses so when Caroline cried, you cried and when Emmie hated the bus, gosh darnit, you hated the bus. I don't know how else to say it but as corny as that sounds, that what made it so impactful for me.

[dramarama2]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:07pm

The show was quite surprising, let's put it that way. I thought the critics liked it?

[Roscoe]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:07pm

I didn't find it to be a particularly "landmark" type show. I thought it was all pretty tired and uninteresting, actually. It certainly took itself seriously, and dealt with Serious Topics and all that, but I never felt that it did anything new with any of it.

[uncageg]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:25pm

A materpiece of musical theatre. For me, it brought back memories of my own mother. Outside of that, it has a brilliant score. Ms. Tsori very skillfully blended a number of styles of music and the performances were all wonderful. Live, the orchestra was outstanding. And an 11th hour number that will reduce you to tears. Also the show was partly based on Kushner's life. I am so sorry I only got to see it once. But I play the OBCR a lot.

Updated On: 10/28/07 at 04:25 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:35pm

The reviews in New York were mixed (except for John Heilpern of Newsday, John Lahr of The New Yorker, Elysa Gardener of USA Today, Adam Feldman of Time Out New York and Frank Rich in the Sunday Times -- all of whom raved). However, the critics in London, LA, San Francisco, Boston, DC and Philly were all almost entirely very positive.

I've written a lot about the show, going all the way back to one of its first previews at the Public. I don't have time to add much at the moment other than it's thoroughly unlike and more deeply affecting than any other show I can recall the musical theater ever producing. It is a landmark for its ability to speak so passionately and honestly about the real problems of real life people and how it manages to discuss racial, gender and social politics, history, economics, and the realities of poverty in this country without ever getting preachy and didactic about it. The story is a marvel of simplicity yet in what it has to say about the human condition and the lie that the American dream is for many people in this country, it has a depth and weight on a par with the greatest of epic masterpieces.

In it we watch a woman trapped by circumstance and at a dead end in her life pray to god for her negation, see it occur and share her catharsis at her rebirth. Musical theater had never done that before. That's why CAROLINE OR CHANGE is so special and unique.

Updated On: 10/28/07 at 04:35 PM

[joshy]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:42pm

It's my favourite show after SWEENEY TODD. It's just so human and raw and beautiful.

Here in London almost all the critics raved. And each time I saw it , the audience absolutely loved it.

[sally1112]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 4:57pm

I thought the show was incredible on many levels but the major two were great writing, and great performances. I have asked my self repeating why this show didn't stay around a little longer, it was a great night of thought-provoking theater.
You really felt like you went through something when those lights went up.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 5:08pm

Initially, there was nothing about CAROLINE, OR CHANGE that attracted me to it, except the concept of a 60's 'girl group' type of trio representing The Radio. Aside from that, there was nothing that attracted me to the show -- the logo art was depressing and I just thought it was just a civil rights type of show, which I wasn't in the mood for anytime soon.

Though the gals playing The Radio looked spectacular during the opening "One Night Only" number with Hugh Jackman at the Tony Awards, that "Lot's Wife" number just dampened any interest on this show to me. That number pretty much killed it. Too gospel-ish for my taste, thank you very much.

Then came the announcement that the show was closing during the 2 weeks I'd be in the city. Wanting to add this show to my 'Flops I've Seen' list, I purchased 2 tickets Orchestra Center Row A.

All I have to say now is that the moment the drum beat started shortly after Tonya Pinkins began her humming, my jaw dropped and remained so during the entire 1st act.

What unfolded before my eyes that night was sheer electrifying magic. That score, with all its varying music styles, just threw me on a loop. Everything about the show was sheer magic, especially the opera-like element of how the dialogue was mostly sung.

The following morning I rushed to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square and purchased the 2-disc cast recording and its remained one of my favorites ever since.

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE was a landmark in many ways -- it just impossible to find just one great thing about it. There are way too many.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 5:31pm

A couple of excerpts from the New York reviews:

John Lahr of the New Yorker:

"There are moments in the history of theatre when stagecraft takes a new turn. I like to think that this happened for the American musical last week, when Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change” (at the Public), a collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director George C. Wolfe, bushwhacked a path beyond the narrative dead end of the deconstructed, overfreighted musicals of the past thirty years. In place of the slick grab bag of boulevard distraction, “Caroline, or Change” offers the complexity of psychology and of history. Set in 1963, in a suburban enclave of Lake Charles, Louisiana, the musical concerns two stranded souls: eight-year-old Noah Gellman (Harrison Chad), who is suffering from the twin griefs of a recently deceased mother and a newly acquired stepmother, and his family’s saturnine maid, Caroline Thibodeaux (Tonya Pinkins). Kushner’s bittersweet autobiographical saga settles for no easy emotional solutions; it takes the musical back to storytelling, to a moral universe, to a dissection of American society, and to folklore—that is, the lore of the folk, both black and white, which Zora Neale Hurston called “the boiled-down juice of human living.” Hurston, who had worked as a maid, argued as early as 1950 that, in order to rid themselves of the feelings of difference that inspire dislike and fear, people needed to bear witness not to the “ ‘exceptional’ Negro” or to the “quaint” Negro but to “how the average behaves.” The most extraordinary of this musical’s many thrills is its ability—through an idiom in which the Washer, the Dryer, the Radio, and even the local Bus are incarnated and sing to Caroline—to plumb and to honor the ordinary."



John Heilpern in the Observer:

"My favorite Jewish homosexual socialist playwright, Tony Kushner, is on a roll, and we are glad. His joyful, wholly successful collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori on Caroline, or Change at the Public Theater is a quiet and monumental achievement in American musical theater.

Immensely moving and totally unsentimental, it touches a rare pinnacle. Tears are best earned; easy sentiment belongs to traditionally glitzy, milk-it Broadway. "Salty, salty, salty teardrops," as the Supremes-like song from the radio goes during the show in ironic showbiz counterpoint to the most shatteringly raw lament I've ever heard in the theater.

Not that the playwright and the gifted Ms. Tesori don't shine it on. The score isn't grave: Ms. Tesori uses everything from jazz-funk to blues, klezmer and soul, from near-operetta to a catchy children's play song. In its uncompromised essence, Caroline, or Change is a chamber piece and fable, and it's a tragedy of American life told with abundant wit and generosity of heart. In its restrained and gentle way, it is purely what it is. It asks us modestly and in all transparent simplicity to listen to a short story and watch it magically unfold. The way it unfolds brings particular joy to me.

We are our imagination. But Mr. Kushner is going after the imaginatively near-impossible: an adult story that also appears to come from a child's point of view. His recent, fruitful collaboration with Maurice Sendak has been an influence. (But so has Brecht, Marx, Melville, perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson and-knowing a little about Mr. Kushner-probably a thousand others.) The artless naïveté of George C. Wolfe's very fine production accounts for the seductive freshness of the remarkable evening. The simple, mysterious magic onstage seems dreamily natural, even real. The defining achievement of the show is that it returns the theater to a revitalized sense of play that creates its own convention...........

All of Mr. Kushner's plays link private sorrow and public trauma in a metaphor of American tragedy. His vastly underrated Homebody/Kabul was a clairvoyant journey without maps or even common language to Afghanistan-symbolic center of the ravaged, ****ed-up, colonized world. Angels in America is plague as metaphor for American disintegration and Reaganite lies. Even an apparently sweet, folkloric piece like Caroline and its parable of change continues Mr. Kushner's urgent sense of America's tragic history and hopes for redemption...........

You must see Caroline, or Change, if you can. It's the finest musical theater to come our way in a long, long time."

[DG]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 5:36pm

"How did the real audiences feel?"

We missed seeing it in NYC (our visit was when it was between Off-Broadway and On,) so we ended up seeing the original cast here in LA. I had read so much about it - including Margo's wonderful thoughts - but wasn't prepared for how overwhelmed I was.

I have no idea what the audience reaction was in NYC, but here in LA it was greeted with long, screaming ovations. It was truly and completely embraced.

[Roninjoey]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 5:39pm

It was a truly iconoclastic and moving piece of theater. I have hardly ever seen something so emotionally organic and surprising.

[The Boy From Ohio]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 7:44pm

I'm really looking forward to seeing this show. A small local semi-pro theater is brave enough to produce it and it has gotten good reviews. I'm sure it will not be anywhere near the quality of Off-Broadway or on Broadway, but after the praise it has gotten on this board, I'll take Caroline, or Change any way I can. Anyone in the SW Ohio area would be foolish to miss this production.
Reviews: http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20071027/NEWS01/310270028/
http://citybeat.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A142569
Theater link: http://newstagecollective.com

Updated On: 10/28/07 at 07:44 PM

[Testing1232]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 7:52pm

It was one of the best (if not,THE best) show that I have ever seen. (along with "Ragtime")

It was brilliant, and extremely moving !

Not much else that I can say (that has not already been said)
by others that loved the show.

[uncageg]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 7:58pm

Nice review. The only part I don't agree with is "The only point of the production that’s dead wood is when Mrs. Gellman’s family arrives for a Hanukah visit." It is part of the set-up for the last quarter of the show.

[Testing1232]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 8:27pm

<< Nice review. The only part I don't agree with is "The only point of the production that’s dead wood is when Mrs. Gellman’s family arrives for a Hanukah visit." It is part of the set-up for the last quarter of the show >>

Agree, Uncaged... you MUST have the "Hanukah Visit" in the show, and that scene is where Anika Noni Rose really shines !!!

[luvcaroline]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 9:45pm

This was the best theatrical experience of my life (hence my screen name), and I had the good fortune to see it in NYC (the weekend before the Tony's) as well as in LA. I agree with many who have already posted as to what made this production so special. I think it also bears emphasizing that this was a totally original story, i.e. it was not based on any other medium, such as a book or film (very rare these days). I had very little knowledge of the premise of the story when I first saw it, so I was completely mesmerized by it as it unfolded before me. It was a simple story, really, but with layers of meaning that were actually quite complex. It was not possible to sit in that theater and NOT be moved. The cast was brilliant and the music exquisite (and really best appreciated live). Just a monumental achievement in musical theater that will rarely be duplicated, I'm afraid.

[jrb_actor]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 10:06pm

I consider it one of the top theatre experiences of my life. I saw it after the Tony Awards, and while I am so thrilled for those brilliant Avenue Q boys and felt Idina was thrilling, I left COC feeling that a huge mistake had been made at the Tonys. I think it should have won the Pulitzer as well--though I don't recall who won that year, so no slight to that play.

The beautiful thing is that the show has done so well post-Broadway. I hope the piece lives as long a life as any other great piece of theatre.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 10:45pm

Is the OBC the full show?

[uncageg]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 11:13pm

Yes, the OBC is the entire show. If not, it is 99 percent of it.

And Testing, it is when Anika shines and also, for me, is an important part of her storyline.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 10/28/07 at 11:52pm

Thanks for that uncageg.

[mallardo]

Posted: 10/29/07 at 3:23am

I would just add that, like all great art, it touches everyone, not just Americans with culturally specific connnections to it. It was very gratifying to me to see the audiences in London respond to it so wholeheartedly and to see the cast - all but Tonya Pinkins and Ramona Keller were English - perform with such committment and intensity and to really "get" it so completely. Masterpiece indeed.

[westcoast_wannabe]

Posted: 10/29/07 at 7:12am

The show is epic in its simplicity. Here you have this small story about real people told in this grand operatic fashion. The story is about real people with real problems and through this seemingly small story major social issues are discussed and dealt with. I was lucky to have seen the show in San Francisco. I had only gone because I was bored and wanted to get out of the house and it turned out to be one of the most amazing nights I have ever spent in the theater. It was so unlike any other musical I had ever seen before. In many ways it felt more like a play in both its staging and story. While it would have been a great play, it was an extraordinary musical.

** How did real audiences feel**

My grandma and a group of her friends and my aunt and a group of her friends have season tickets to the “Best of Broadway” series in both San Francisco and Sacramento. I’ve talked to several of them about the show and there responses ranged from luke warm to utter hatred. I almost never agree with any of their opinions, but unfortunately I think they reflect those of most casual theater goers.