Royal Academy of Music – Carousel

Picture: Craig Fuller

Carousel at the Royal Academy of Music’s Susie Sainsbury Theatre, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

June was bustin’ out all over into sweltering July as the RAM’s musical theatre stars of the future made a sizzling success of Carousel, almost 80 years old now but coming up as fresh as paint and sharp as a tack in director Bruce Guthrie’s stunning re-creation of arguably Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s finest collaboration.

From the moment the superb 28-piece house orchestra struck up the lilting, swaying ‘Carousel Waltz’ and we were introduced to the principal characters, the audience was hooked. It’s a long show, almost three hours, but the pace never flagged – and the songs! What songs they are, some of the all-time greats, and how magically they were performed.

Guthrie impressed with his take on Merrily We Roll Along for RAM last summer but this was even better. It helps, of course, to have such talent to work but this director has a gift that allows students to get the very most out of themselves.

Fairground barker Billy Bigelow is clearly a bad lot but simple mill worker Julie Jordan can’t help but fall for this Jack-the-lad in the dark story of domestic violence and suicide set among the fairground workers and fisherfolk of a small New England town.

There’s plenty of light among the darkness with the carnival, the clambake and the subsidiary romance between Julie’s friend Carrie Pipperidge and her rather pleased-with-himself suitor Enoch Snow who plans to turn his one fishing boat into a fleet and raise a big family in style – although nine children was not exactly what poor, put-upon Carrie had in mind.

Bigelow desperately wants to make a success of his marriage as we hear in the ‘Soliloquy’ that closes Act I in which he excitedly looks forward to great times ahead with Bill Junior “or what if it’s a girl?” but, sacked and skint, Billy takes a risk to provide for their unborn child, the job goes wrong and he tragically uses the knife given to him by his feckless accomplice Jigger on himself.

Until Guthrie’s production, I always had trouble with Hammerstein’s vision of redemption which was that a sinner could return to earth to do godly good. In this case, Bigelow is promised a place in heaven if he can make everything right with his daughter Louise, now 15 but a bitter loner shunned by schoolmates because of his infamous misdemeanours (which I found hard to believe so long after her father’s death).

Finally a musical I had for decades admired for its majestic score, but found its fantastical ending hard to love, worked for me. And the final tableau, with Billy, Julie and Louise locked together after the graduation ceremony in one big happy-family hug as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ was reprised, brought many of the audience to tears.

Six performances over four days were shared by two cohorts, the A cast and the Z cast. I saw the Z squad and my initial disappointment at not seeing the A team’s Emily Botnen, runner-up in last month’s Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year, was swiftly overcome by Chloe Saracco’s delicious interpretation of the role of Carrie. With her light, tinkling soprano and her every gesture, Chloe owned the stage. The deeper, richer voice of Joanna Adaran, particularly in the reflective ‘What’s The Use of Wond’rin’?’, was spine-tingling too and Job Greuter’s eight-minute-long ‘Soliloquy’ as Billy, never easy to get the timing spot-on, was a revelation.

Edward Conroy’s big voice as Enoch dominated the ‘When the Children Are Asleep’ duet, Sarah von Egypt had good moments as Nettie as did Shamael Guy as carousel owner Mrs Mullin who wanted Billy for herself, Jack Lark multi-tasked in three cameos and Joe Kelly could not have been nastier as troublemaker Jigger.

The ‘Ballet’ sequence, choreographed by Ben Hartley, with Louise (Aoife Dardis) and a carnival boy trying to seduce her (James Lim) was thrilling to watch and the busy, crowded sets for carnival and clambake were a credit to April Dalton who also designed the costumes.

And what a joy it must have been for the orchestra, under the musical direction of student Jemma Starling (Niall Casserly for the A cast) to play a score which Rodgers himself thought represented his finest work. Add the gorgeous ‘If I Loved You’, the witty ‘Mister Snow’, made famous by the great Barbara Cook, and the life-enhancing ‘June is Bustin’ Out All Over’ to the standards already mentioned, stir in an extraordinary, unusual story (based on Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom) and you have a musical masterpiece that will be adored and replayed until the end of time.

Jeremy Chapman