On Thursday night, we attended Caroline, or Change, the Tony Kushner musical (yes, I said Tony Kushner musical —, yes, Angels in America, that Tony Kushner) at the Royal National Theatre in London. We left that production with stars in our eyes — almost literally, there were stars in the show, and a Moon, and a Washing Machine, and a Dryer, and a Radio — you had to be there.
How can I describe this production? Well, first of all, know that the writer was Tony Kushner, and it was originally staged at the Public Theatre under the direction of George C. Wolfe. It is technically a musical, but it feels more like a play with music. Most of the dialogue is recitative, and the music doesn’t automatically sound like “tunes”, though the inspirations are very tuneful — rhythm and blues and 60s soul music. This site will give you an idea of the opening number (turn on your sound).
The setting is Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the opening song has lines like “Nothing happens underground in Louisina/Cause there ain’t no underground in Louisiana/There’s only underwater” while we see clearly that Caroline, the title character, is a maid who is working in a basement – the only basement, we learn, in the state. The time is November-December 1963, and anybody who knows their American history knows what November ‘63 is famous for. The play/musical that follows traces Caroline’s reaction to the change that is coming in that decade. Just to set the scene some more: Caroline is the black maid who works for a family of liberal Southern Jews, and that family consists of one child, Noah, who has lost his mother to cancer, and whose father is totally withdrawn, but whose stepmother, a Jew from New York, has come to fix things. This is the story of how they are fixed.
What’s really interesting is that the things/people Caroline talks to or is talked to by are not people but objects — the Washing Machine, the Dryer, and the Radio. Later, she’s told by a Bus that President Kennedy has been killed, and the Moon makes comments throughout. I won’t say more about the story — do your own research — but let me just say that the play/musical/whatever was unique. In one way it reminded me of Horse, in that the objects around Caroline work rather like the Jury, but the rest of the thing — pretty well all of it, with one or two stand-out exhanges and lines — is sung-through. It’s freeform and magical and unrealistic and real, and it’s about race and class and the Civil Rights Movement and how these all affect real people in specific places in time and space.
I’d see it again tomorrow.
