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by music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Tony Kushner, directed by Robert McQueen

Acting Up Stage Company with Obsidian Theatre Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

January 23-February 12, 2012

Caroline, or Change has a literate, highly imaginative book and lyrics by Tony Kushner, famous for his epic drama Angels in America (1991).  In response Jeanine Tesori has written an intricate, complex score that references everything from Mozart and the US national anthem to gospel, rhythm and blues, Motown, opera and klezmer.  With virtually no spoken dialogue it is more a chamber opera than a traditional musical.  The combined forces of the Acting Up Stage Company and the Obsidian Theatre Company have fielded an ideal cast with insightful direction by Robert McQueen for the work’s Canadian premiere.  The only problem with the show is Kushner’s book which in trying to avoid a clichéd or sentimental ending winds up with one that will satisfy few.

At the centre of the story is Caroline Thibodeaux given a wonderfully luminous performance by Arlene Duncan.  It is November 1963 in Louisiana and she, at age 39 and divorced, expected that by this time her life would have amounted to more than being a maid.  Duncan masterfully conveys the pent up frustration and anger in Caroline that causes her to be so uncommunicative to the Jewish family she works for.  Stuck in the basement most of the day her main companions are a singing washing machine and a sexy dryer (personified with flair by Londa Larmond and Sterling Jarvis respectively) and her portable radio embodied by the spiffy Supremes-like trio of Neema Bickersteth, Jewelle Blackman and Alana Hibbert.

Caroline is unhappy but so is the Gellman family, her employers.  Nine-year-old Noah (in an amazingly perceptive performance by Michael Levinson) is still mourning the death of his mother.  His father Stuart (Cameron MacDuffee) is awkward and distant.  His marriage to Rose (Deborah Hay), his mother’s best friend seems like a betrayal and Noah can’t allow her to share any of his affections.  The fact that Hay gives such a sympathetic performance, showing how Rose perseveres at home despite the negative atmosphere, makes us long for a resolution between mother and son.  Noah, however, looks to Caroline as his friend, a notion she disccourages. 

Noah has the habit of not emptying his pockets before he puts his pants in the laundry.  Caroline dutifully collects the loose change and gives it back.  Eventually, Rose decides to teach him the value of money by telling Caroline she can keep whatever money Noah leaves in his pockets.  On the one hand, Caroline finds the situation insulting.  On the other, she knows she and her three children at home could use the extra money.  As a secret favour to Caroline, Noah begins deliberately leaving change in his pocket, pleased that he is helping her.  Things reach a crisis, however, when Noah mistakenly leaves the twenty dollar bill in his pocket that his grandfather (a boisterous Shawn Wright) gave him for Hanukkah.  When he asks for it back both he and Caroline say hurtful words to each other and wonder if the rift can ever be healed.        

Clearly, the musical’s title has multiple meanings.  It refers to the maid and the money Noah leaves for her, but Kennedy’s assassination and the tearing down of a Confederate monument are also part of the story.  Noah’s grandfather, an old-school lefty, hopes for violent class and race warfare, while Caroline’s daughter Emmie (sung and acted with real fire by Sabryn Rock) hopes for peaceful change as Martin Luther King demands.  Another aspect of change is the nature of the Moon (embodied by Bickersteth using her full operatic voice) and her sublunary realm. 

“Or”, however, is a tricky word.  In 17th- and 18th-century titles, as in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, the subtitle expresses more clearly the theme of the play--and so it does here.  On the other hand, in ordinary parlance “or” implies an alternative.  And, quite surprisingly, that is what Kushner’s title also implies.  In her final song “Lot’s Wife” (sung with enormous emotional power by Duncan), Caroline exclaims, “Can't afford change, / changin's a danger for a woman like me, / trapped tween the Devil and the muddy brown sea. / I got to get back to the way that I been / God! / Drag me back to that basement again.”  Thus Caroline represents maintaining personal integrity versus changing her life or participating in societal change. 

Intellectually, we can understand why Kushner chose this as his ending.  All the reconciliations we long for--between Caroline and Noah, between Rose and Noah, Stuart and Noah and even Stuart and Rose--Kushner seems to have rejected as sentimental, in favour of making Caroline a tragic symbol of the generations of African-Americans born too early to benefit from the civil rights movement.  Yet, without those reconciliations, the story seems incomplete.  Kushner may intend this since indeed there is still prejudice and inequality.  Nevertheless, we leave the show feeling we’ve missed the final scene.  With his knowledge of the classics, I was surprised that Kushner did not solve the problem of the ending the way Euripides would.  Euripides’ use of a deus ex machina in plays like Alcestis was his way of rounding off the plot while still underscoring that the problem he has presented would otherwise have no solution.  Kushner, after all, has the Moon as a character who could metaphorically tie up the loose ends and leave it to us to see the irony between what happens on stage and the underlying conflicts in the story.

Michael Gianfrancesco has created the most elaborate set ever seen at the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, but one that very cleverly allows for a fluid and clear staging.  Sound designer Peter McBoyle deserves special credit for setting the performers’ microphones at just the right level that subtly enhances the singers’ natural voices rather than distorting them as happens all too frequently. 

Whether you embrace Kushner’s ending or feel he has painted himself into an aesthetic corner, Caroline, or Change is a powerful work that shifts the boundaries of what a musical can be and thus should appeal to both theatre-goers and musical-lovers.  It is sure to provoke both admiration and debate, and in art that is no bad thing.                         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Arlene Duncan and Michael Levinson. ©2012 Joanna Akyol.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.