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    Review: ‘Next to Normal’ Is Back, With Extra Pathos

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    A London revival of the hit musical brings extra warmth to the story of a woman in psychological free fall.A mind in torment is making for some terrific theater at the moment in London, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Next to Normal” is belatedly having its British debut 14 years after it opened to acclaim on Broadway. The local premiere at the intimate but important Donmar Warehouse runs through Oct. 7, and this engagement looks unlikely to be its last.In between its Broadway run and now, the show has been seen in an immersive production in Barcelona and its composer, Tom Kitt, has written a handful of other Broadway musicals.But as staged afresh in London under the astute eye of the director Michael Longhurst, “Next to Normal,” a portrait of a woman in psychic turmoil, has a renewed sting.Longhurst is soon to depart his post as artistic director of the Donmar (Timothy Sheader takes over the job next year) so is easing his way out on a high. In casting “Next to Normal,” he has plucked a supporting performer, Caissie Levy, from his lauded 2021 Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change” to inherit from the Tony winner Alice Ripley the demanding lead role of Diana Goodman, a bipolar wife and mother whom we witness in accelerating degrees of distress. The result is transformative: Whereas the show I recall in New York (with a different cast) was commanding but chilly, this version owes its extra pathos to Levy’s innate warmth: You feel for Diana at every step, even as you fear where her wayward emotions may lead her next.Jamie Parker as Dan and Caissie Levy as Diana. Marc BrennerA Broadway alumna of “Hair” and “Frozen,” Levy from the start pulls you into her character’s increasing confusion. We see at the outset the difficulty Diana faces in simply making sandwiches, the bread laid out before her as if as if this routine domestic task were an unusual challenge.From there, the musical darkens to embrace shock therapy, attempted suicide and multiple hallucinations, the specifics of which are best left unrevealed. Some may chafe at the cumulative effect of a through-sung musical that lets neither its characters nor its audience off the hook; we witness Diana’s reluctant surrender to electroconvulsive therapy, followed by memory loss that further amplifies her trauma.Some may flinch at the unyielding nature of the despair that unfolds, but those attuned to its candor may emerge from the show with clarity: It’s no surprise that the final song is entitled “Light.” This musical opts not for fake sentimental uplift, but for the courage that comes from facing down mental illness, acknowledging human frailty and somehow finding a way to carry on.Several references move the world of the show on from a decade ago. Mentions of X, formerly known as Twitter, and climate change suggest the present day, and Chloe Lamford’s sliding, bleakly antiseptic set — representing both home and hospital — exists in colorless contrast to the blood that gets spilled upon it. (The London-based American performer Trevor Dion Nicholas ably doubles as the two doctors struggling to diagnose Diana’s condition.)Trevor Dion Nicholas doubles as two doctors struggling to find a diagnosis for Diana’s condition.Marc BrennerLevy steers the production, her voice softening on the plaintive solo “I Miss the Mountains” before acquiring the necessary steeliness for “You Don’t Know,” Diana’s furious duet with her husband, Dan. In that role, Jamie Parker, a onetime Harry Potter on the London and Broadway stage, communicates the anguish that comes from watching a loved one slip away: The sight of him, late on, curled up in despair in the family kitchen, is among the show’s most rending.As the couple’s musician daughter, Natalie, Eleanor Worthington-Cox brings some serious pipes to the part of a teenager determined not to follow in her mother’s fraught emotional path. Jack Ofrecio is properly sympathetic as her boyfriend, a good-natured stoner who attempts to keep Natalie from her own psychological free fall.And the production boasts a genuine breakout star in the fresh-faced Jack Wolfe, who seizes the role of the antic son, Gabe, and brings a darting sense of danger whenever he appears on the two-tiered stage. (The music director Nick Barstow’s expert band is positioned above the action, obscured now and again by screens that suggest a clouded mind.)In superb voice, Wolfe has an electrifying talent that more than matches Levy’s own, and when he rocks out on the character’s solo number “I’m Alive” — Gabe’s searing anthem of self-assertion — it feels as if there’s no more vital theatrical place to be.Next to NormalThrough Oct. 7 at the Donmar Warehouse, in London; donmarwarehouse.com. More

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      London’s Theater Cuts Matter, on Broadway and Beyond

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      The cushion of state money let the Hampstead and Donmar playhouses develop broad programs with international reach. Now they must find creative ways to play on.LONDON — Standing ovations at London theaters are drearily routine these days, but I experienced one a few weeks ago that felt genuinely impassioned. I’m thinking of the fervent audience response to a new two-character play, “Blackout Songs,” on Hampstead Theater’s intimate second stage. (The show runs at the 100-seat Hampstead Downstairs until Dec. 10.)Chronicling the bruised and bruising relationship between two self-destructive drinkers who meet at an A.A. meeting, Joe White’s spiky tragicomedy is impressive on several fronts. Its performers, Alex Austin and Rebecca Humphries, fearlessly inhabit two restless lovers trying to stave off psychic and physical ruin. The writing plays with time, asking the audience to piece together a fragmented narrative that views these characters — unnamed until the very end — at critical points as they ricochet in and out of each other’s lives.The play asks a lot of the two actors, who meet its demands with force. But there was an additional reason for the palpable excitement in the house at the show’s end that night. The excellence of the show dealt a direct rebuke to the still fresh news of major cuts in government ‌subsidies for arts institutions across London, in which the Hampstead lost its entire grant. Work like “Blackout Songs” is what the Hampstead exists to do, and suddenly the theater felt at risk.The same fate befell the venerable Donmar Warehouse, another small theater with an outsize reach. Might the activity of two playhouses so crucial to the theatrical ecosystem — not just in London — be somehow curtailed? Would they have to become safer, less adventurous?Both houses have long shown their importance, here and overseas. Equipped with three auditoriums between them (the Hampstead has a 370-seat main stage as well), they have generated a substantial body of work, sending shows from London into the world and also offering homes to shows from abroad. The Donmar has just staged the European premiere of “The Band’s Visit”; a second American musical, “Next to Normal,” is scheduled to arrive there next year.To cut these theaters’ subsidies is to advocate, willingly or not, for shrunken ambitions. Philanthropy and commercial activities can pick up the slack, of course, as in the United States. But donor bases don’t arrive overnight. The cushion of state money let the Hampstead and the Donmar develop broad programs with international reach. Unless the theaters tread carefully, the effects of the cut will be felt far beyond London.I can easily see international producers snapping up “Blackout Songs,” not least because its compactness — two characters, one set — is attractive financially. But the director Guy Jones’s production sets the bar high. On a bare stage with just a few chairs, the play’s jagged, nonlinear style is accompanied by whiplash shifts in mood that Humphries and the compellingly volatile Austin capture with ease. The impact couldn’t be stronger, prompting the best sort of guessing game about where the play might end up next.“The Band’s Visit” at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Michael Longhurst.Marc BrennerThe Hampstead has a history of birthing plays that have entered the theatrical canon. Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man” and Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party” premiered there, as did Harold Pinter’s seminal two-hander, “The Dumb Waiter.” The flow of writing works both ways: The Hampstead has hosted multiple American Pulitzer Prize-winners and finalists, including Marsha Norman, Martyna Majok, Tony Kushner and Stephen Karam.“The Humans,” the Karam play that won the 2016 Tony Award, traveled to the Hampstead in 2018 with its American cast. An earlier Karam play, “Sons of the Prophet,” will receive an overdue British premiere on the Hampstead’s ‌main stage on Dec. 12: further evidence of that two-way traffic.Sure, not every Hampstead offering has been of comparable value. It has faltered of late with plays like “The Breach” and “The Snail House,” two misfires from Naomi Wallace and Richard Eyre; the current main stage play, Rona Munro’s history-minded “Mary,” is beautifully directed by the Hampstead’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert, but doesn’t galvanize the audience as “Blackout Songs” does downstairs. (It also requires more background knowledge of Mary, Queen of Scots and her court than most playgoers will possess.)Still, it’s important to the Hampstead to program a range of work across its two theaters and throughout the year. “What’s the point of a theater not having shows?” Greg Ripley-Duggan, the Hampstead’s executive producer, said pointedly by phone this week. But, he added, the lost subsidy was “an awful lot of money to make up, and to make up from one year to the next. The business model is going to have to change radically.”An absence of state funding will mean greater reliance on corporate and individual philanthropy, and pressure on ticket prices in a city where playgoing — especially away from the West End — is still reasonably affordable. Tickets for “Blackout Songs” can be had for about $12, a sum unheard-of in New York.Across town at the Donmar, a recent 30th-anniversary gala fell within days of the funding cut announcement, and the playhouse’s current and former artistic directors took to the stage at the event to celebrate the 251-seat powerhouse and argue for its survival. The Donmar is also lucky to be hosting a show just now that plays to its strengths: “The Band’s Visit.” On view through Dec. 3, the production is the first musical at this address from its current artistic director, Michael Longhurst, whose career spans both sides of the Atlantic, much like the Donmar itself. “Frost/Nixon” and “Red” are just two Broadway hits first seen there, as was Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” which is now back onstage in New York through Feb. 5.“The Band’s Visit” has gone in the other direction. Much lauded on Broadway, this adaptation of a 2007 Israeli movie of the same name has an unshowy sweetness ‌that suits the intimacy of the Donmar — all the better for a musical set in an Israeli backwater that is transformed by the unexpected appearance of a‌‌ group of Egyptian ‌musicians lost on‌ their way to somewhere else.Like “Blackout Songs,” this loving reappraisal of “The Band’s Visit” brought the audience to its feet. Let’s hope the Donmar, and the Hampstead, find creative ways to play on.Blackout Songs. Directed by Guy Jones. Hampstead Downstairs through Dec. 10.The Band’s Visit. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Donmar Warehouse through Dec. 3. More

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      In London Theaters, the Show (Sometimes) Goes On

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      A surge in coronavirus infections toppled production after production, but two stage adaptations — of a movie and a blockbuster novel — recovered and endure.LONDON — The show goes on, or these days maybe not. The uptick of coronavirus infections in the last month has upended live performances as severely here as on Broadway. During the holiday season, productions toppled one after another, unable to continue because of outbreaks in their casts or crews. Barely had Rebecca Frecknall’s revelatory revival of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne, opened to rave reviews before it lost a spate of performances, a scenario repeated on and off the West End.Shutdowns affected big productions like “Moulin Rouge!,” the epic Tony-winning musical whose much-delayed London opening is now scheduled for Jan. 20. But they also occurred at fringe theaters like the Bush, where a two-hander called “Fair Play” closed within days of its premiere. (The run has since resumed.) Elsewhere, the organizers of the VAULT festival decided “with broken hearts,” they said in a statement, to cancel what would have been the 10th anniversary edition of that important showcase for new work.The Royal Court and the National Theater, two prominent state-funded playhouses, shut their doors altogether during the lucrative holiday period, and, over in the commercial sphere, Andrew Lloyd Webber closed his new musical, “Cinderella,” until February. “I am absolutely devastated,” the composer wrote on Twitter on Dec. 21.So you can imagine my delight this week to find the Donmar Warehouse back in business after being caught up in the closures, presenting the stage premiere of “Force Majeure,” adapted from the 2014 movie. (The play is scheduled to run through Feb. 5.) The audience at the 251-seat theater had to show proof of vaccination or a negative antigen test before entry, and we remained masked throughout — something that, until recently, has been an all too rare sight here. (At “Cinderella” back in August, I clocked scarcely a single mask.)I’m not sure that the playwright Tim Price’s adaptation, alas, is worth all the protocol. Those who know the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Cannes Grand Jury prize-winner will recall its portrait of a marriage in free fall, which is sometimes bitterly funny but, more often than not, disturbing and even eerie. Set during five days in the French Alps, “Force Majeure” tells of a husband and wife and their two young children whose ski holiday doesn’t quite go as planned.Caught up in a controlled avalanche that appears to be out of control, Tomas abandons his family in the moment of crisis — or so claims his wife, Ebba, who is shaken by his behavior. Before long, Tomas’s ready smile turns to howls of grief and an awareness that their relationship has been altered for keeps.The theatrical version’s director, Michael Longhurst, has turned the Donmar stage into a miniature ski slope, and the backdrop of Jon Bausor’s clever design shows off the snow-capped mountains essential to the action. What transfers less well is the darkening, ambiguous tone of a film that, in Price’s stage iteration, seems both more literal and more vulgar: Much is made of one character’s priapic tendencies. The couple’s stage children are sullen brats who would have been better off left at home, and the film’s extraordinary ending aboard a wayward bus has been discarded in favor of silly shenanigans in an overcrowded elevator.As the hapless couple, Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshal, both fine actors, slalom their way between affection and recrimination in what plays for the most part as a routine domestic comedy. Tomas’s breakdown — harrowing to watch onscreen — elicited laughs from some spectators the other night.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi and Tom Larkin as Tiger Head in “Life of Pi,” directed by Max Webster, at Wyndham’s Theater.Johan PerssonThe stagecraft is more of an occasion at another play whose performances were interrupted late last year: “Life of Pi,” at Wyndham’s Theater, improbably brings to theatrical life the 2001 novel by Yann Martel that inspired the acclaimed 2012 film for which the director Ang Lee won an Oscar.In that version, 3-D plunges the moviegoer directly into the turbulent waters of a tale told largely at sea, as the teenage Pi, a zookeeper’s son, finds himself cast adrift on a lifeboat with only animals for company — chief among them a Bengal tiger known as Richard Parker. Not to be outdone, the play brings together veterans from the world of video and puppetry who work alongside the director Max Webster and the designer Tim Hatley in conjuring an array of beasts before a rapt audience. The cast list includes six puppeteers for the tiger alone, overseen by the puppetry and movement director Finn Caldwell, who also designed the puppets with Nick Barnes.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The latest Covid data in the U.S. More

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      After Its Odds-Defying Run, John Cariani Says Bye to ‘Caroline, or Change’

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      For a little while on Sunday evening, after the final performance of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54, the actor John Cariani disappeared from backstage to have his portrait taken upstairs. No one had told the boys, though, and when Cariani reappeared, his young castmates — some of whom had played his son — flocked around, teasing him and hugging him. They were palpably pleased he hadn’t given them the slip.Stuart Gellman, the lost-in-grief clarinetist in Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Broadway musical, is the first father Cariani has ever played. Stuart — a widower newly remarried to Rose, played by Caissie Levy — is also the first character to tap Cariani’s clarinet skills, dormant for more than 30 years. When the pandemic shutdown delayed the revival of “Caroline” by a year and a half, he used that time to polish them.Clockwise from left: Stuart Zagnit, John Cariani, Adam Makké and Joy Hermalyn in “Caroline or Change.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the production’s director, Michael Longhurst, said: “He could play a bit, and now he can play astonishingly, which is just a dream.”In a precarious theater season pocked with cancellations, “Caroline” made it the full three months and one day from its first preview to the scheduled end of its limited run without missing a performance. So did Cariani, 52, last seen on Broadway in 2018 in “The Band’s Visit.” (Some actors in that musical played instruments, but he did not.)Cariani’s previous Broadway shows, including “Something Rotten!” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” all continued after his contract with them was up, so giving a closing performance as an original cast member was new to him. On Saturday night, it took him by surprise when sadness crept into his voice midshow. Usually, he said, his feelings wait until later.By Sunday evening, sitting down for an interview in his dressing room, he was only beginning to process his experience with the production. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.In an interview after the final performance on Sunday, Cariani said that his character, Stuart, lives through his clarinet.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesTell me about your evolution as a clarinetist.I played from age 10 to probably 19. Seriously, too. In college, I played in the pit orchestra for “Sweeney Todd.” And I didn’t know what the play was. I kept getting in trouble because I was watching instead of playing. And that’s when I realized I don’t want to do this. Whatever that is, that’s what I want to do. And then over the pandemic, I played every day because it was the one thing I knew I could do every day.Did developing your facility as a musician on this show coexist with deepening the character of Stuart?Yeah, the clarinet helped me with the singing and the singing helped with the clarinet. Ann Yee, our choreographer, said, “Remember, it’s all of a whole. So don’t think of it as the clarinet and the part.” It was just continuing to realize how much he communicates through his clarinet and getting to keep learning to communicate through the clarinet.Remarkably, “Caroline, or Change” made it through its entire limited run without missing a performance.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWell, that’s the only part of him that’s not recessive.Exactly. It’s the part that explodes. What was interesting is that means going for broke and making mistakes in front of a thousand people sometimes. I made mistakes in front of people, and I survived. And it was just great.You had three different children playing your son. How did that affect your presence?When I do musicals, I become more of a technician than when I do plays. And then finding freedom within the form is hard. Because I had three different kids, I just felt like — and we all felt this — you have to show up with the kid who’s there. And they’re all very different. One was sweet as can be, and so you want to take care of him. One is funny and wry and probably smarter than me. And that’s fun. And then one is mean. And they all work, because the text supports all three of those interpretations.Tony Kushner, Sharon D Clarke and Jeanine Tesori embraced during the curtain call after the last performance.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHow has doing this show during the pandemic compared with any other Broadway experience you’ve had?It hasn’t felt like Broadway. It hasn’t felt like “The Band’s Visit.” I’m going to say that. Because I feel like they were equally received, very warmly received, which is a blessing. I think the pandemic changed numbers. It’s that simple. The number of people who came. I remember when Omicron hit, I heard that the box office completely stopped, like no one was buying tickets. It was noticeable. Because you could see — and people will probably give me a hard time because I shouldn’t [say this] — but the lights come up sometimes, and I can see the audience. And you see pairs [of seats] all over the place, empty.Some of them are because they didn’t sell, and some of them are because people tested positive.They tested positive; they canceled. I had friends who were going to come this last week. Six couples, all tested positive, couldn’t come. I will say that the past five shows have felt like Broadway. Because it’s our last week, we’ve had really good houses, electric audiences.Audience aside, ticket sales aside, how has it been? You’re not going, I assume, to a closing night party, right? Was there an opening party?We didn’t do any of those things.The show was “so much fun,” Cariani said. “Because it’s a mountain to climb every night.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhile audience numbers were affected by the pandemic, the show ended strong, Cariana said. “Our last week, we’ve had really good houses, electric audiences.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHow careful have you had to be to make it all the way through?We don’t go out together as a company. You know, you don’t go visit. It’s just not smart right now. You don’t get to know people. That’s the other hard thing. We don’t get to know each other the way other casts have known each other. I had to ask one of the cleaning guys to take his mask off so I could know what he looks like. We wear our masks all the time backstage. We have to remind each other to take them off before we go on sometimes.Really?I wore my mask on for the J.F.K. sequence, when I don’t have to say anything, but I’m up there looking at the TV. Caissie didn’t even notice. You know who noticed? The boys were watching.“I made mistakes in front of people, and I survived,” Cariani said of playing the clarinet onstage. “And it was just great.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHave you felt safe?The hardest part for me was the commute. I ride on the subway for about 40 minutes total. The first 15 minutes of that ride, most of the people, I would say a good portion of the people, are not masked. A lot of young people, you know? It changes as you go deeper into Manhattan. And then it’s the opposite as you leave.Has this production brought you joy?Caissie and I said this the other night: Right before we come on after “Salty Teardrops,” I was like, “Remember when this was impossible and we said we’re never going to have fun with this? Can you believe how much fun it is?” It’s so much fun. Because it’s a mountain to climb every night.“The Band’s Visit” wasn’t technically difficult for me at all. I had to sing a couple songs, say some words; I had to be there, be present, you know what I mean? But I do think that Sam Sadigursky, who was our clarinet player in “The Band’s Visit,” was a huge influence on me — getting to listen to him every night. And then, I’m not going to lie. It’s fun when Jeanine Tesori comes up to you and says, “I cannot believe you’re playing it all. This is so thrilling.” Because the character plays, and it’s thrilling for her to see the character play. And Tony said that, too. Hugest moment of my life.For any other actor in the part of Stuart, what’s your advice?Remember that half of your role is the clarinet. In rehearsals, I was so focused on getting my singing and my talking right that I was forgetting about living through that clarinet. Even if you don’t play it, figure out how to live through that clarinet. More

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      Review: ‘Caroline, or Change’ Makes History’s Heartbreak Sing

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      An electrifying revival of the 2003 musical, featuring a titanic performance by Sharon D Clarke, follows the money to the source of American inequality.Difficult, even painful stories are no impediment to great musicals. Maybe the opposite is true. Pogroms, suicides and revolutions have all been turned into transcendent shows.Still, few have dared to tell as many such stories as “Caroline, or Change” does. But of the subjects “Caroline” grabs in the meaty fist of its ambition — civil rights, economics, mourning, the Mississippi floodplain — the most radical is also the most traditional: the anguish of troubled love.I speak not of love like Tony and Maria’s, nor even Porgy and Bess’s, but of the love, more honored in the breach, between Blacks and Jews. No musical has ever faced its country’s history, its creators’ history and the history of its genre — which has often caricatured both groups — as unblinkingly as “Caroline.”That was true when it premiered at the Public Theater in 2003 and feels truer now in the electrifying Broadway revival that opened on Wednesday at Studio 54. Not because much has changed in the show itself. Tony Kushner’s book and lyrics, no less than Jeanine Tesori’s flood of ’60s-style music, remain models of thematic concision, wonders of imagery, daring pileups of incompatible emotions.But the world around “Caroline” has changed in ways that make it seem more prescient, more painful and — despite a performance of tragic grandeur in the title role by Sharon D Clarke — more hopeful now than it did back then. As if to acknowledge that, the first thing we see in Michael Longhurst’s shrewd staging for the Roundabout Theater Company, based on his 2018 British production, is a Confederate statue called “that ol copper Nightmare Man.” By evening’s end, at least that nightmare will be over.Others will remain to prickle your conscience and your politics; the premise almost seems designed to make you squirm. Caroline Thibodeaux is a 39-year-old Black woman who, in 1963, works for the Gellmans, a Jewish family in Lake Charles, La. Cleaning, doing laundry and minding 8-year-old Noah after school, she earns $30 a week; on that paltry salary, lacking the help of her absent husband, she must sustain her children. With tyrannical self-discipline that leaves little time for warmth, she very nearly manages.As the leading character in a musical, Caroline is unique: Titanically dour, she seeks to repel all sympathy her circumstances might invite. Noah, too, is a complex character, mourning his mother’s death from lung cancer and fixating on Caroline as a substitute parent. (In this production, three young actors alternate in the role.)Despite their twinned sadnesses, Noah’s love thaws Caroline only to the point of allowing him to light her daily cigarette. Otherwise, she treats him as she might an untrained puppy, shooing him out of the basement where she works, “16 feet below sea level,” in the oppressive heat and humidity of the appliances of her trade.The equilibrium of this precarious system is carefully set up in the opening scenes, as is the musical’s stylistic daring. Instead of a chorus, Kushner provides a pantheon of singing allegorical figures: the bubbly washing machine (Arica Jackson), the infernal dryer (Kevin S. McAllister), the sexy radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya and Harper Miles, wearing aerial tiaras), and the serene moon (N’Kenge). (Later, there’s also a bus, wonderfully voiced by McAllister.) Around these companions she can be herself, as she daren’t around Noah or his despised new stepmother, Rose.Clarke, center, in the musical in which the emotional underpinnings of the household are equated with economics, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCaroline’s imperviousness at first tips the balance of the show’s sympathy toward Noah, whose fantasy of being centrally important in her life is excused by his youth and his grief. (If he is something of a martyr, perhaps it is not insignificant that Kushner sets the semi-autobiographical story at 913 St. Anthony Street.) In a more typical musical, the fulfillment of his needs would fulfill Caroline’s as well.Instead, Noah (Jaden Myles Waldman on the night I attended) precipitates the show’s crisis, unwittingly egged on by Rose (Caissie Levy). Recently married to Noah’s feckless father, and trying to assert authority in the awkward situation, she imposes a new rule: Caroline should keep any change she finds in Noah’s dirty clothes. When Noah, in response, starts leaving money deliberately, Caroline must fight with herself about taking it; the emotional underpinnings of the household, which Kushner equates with economics, very quickly collapse. Change causes change.And that’s barely the half of it. “Caroline” is as full of incident as Kushner’s “Angels in America,” but hugely condensed and then heightened by song. The wonder is that it is never less than thrilling to experience. This being a musical, the music is part of that; Tesori’s wondrous score is like the search function on a car radio, picking up snippets of every genre on the dial. The sounds of klezmer, blues, Broadway, Motown, Mozart and girl-group pop, among many others, pinpoint each character but also serve as expressive vehicles for the larger ideas the story is assembling.Those ideas start small. It seems merely an irritating infraction, for instance, that Rose mispronounces Caroline’s name as Carolyn — until you notice Clarke wincing as if struck when it happens.And Noah’s fantasies, which at first seem merely sweet, soon grow ridiculous and grandiose. He imagines Caroline’s children — teenage Emmie (Samantha Williams) and her younger brothers Jackie and Joe (Alexander Bello and Jayden Theophile on the night I attended) — praising him over dinner for his largess: “Thank God we can eat now!” In reality, they do not think of him at all.Caroline does, if no longer as a pitiful boy then as an ethical dilemma, an heir to the exploitative ways of even liberal whites. Nor does she see Rose as anything more than a tightfisted employer. I’m afraid I almost did, too; it’s a rare miscalculation that she is made the villain of a piece that doesn’t need one. (Surely Noah’s father, Stuart, a musician who in John Cariani’s performance is as mournful as the clarinet he plays, is just as culpable.) In any case, the force of the characters’ needs, once set in motion, is more than enough to do the damage.From left, Adam Makké, Caissie Levy, John Cariani, Chip Zien, Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn at a Hanukkah dinner that sets up the oncoming collision.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLonghurst best dramatizes the oncoming collision in his acute staging of the Gellmans’ Hanukkah dinner. At the middle of the stage, the family — now expanded to include Rose’s lefty father visiting from New York (Chip Zien) and Stuart’s don’t-rock-the-boat Southern parents (Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn) — sing and dance and argue. Rose’s father offers Noah a marvelously compact sermon along with a fateful $20 bill:Money follows certain laws,it’s worth how much it’s worth becausesomewhere, something’s valued less;it’s how our blessings come, I guess.Meanwhile we see Caroline, her friend, Dotty (Tamika Lawrence), and Emmie hustling to prepare and serve the holiday meal as they circumnavigate the Gellmans on a turntable. Though the whites are literally centered, the image nevertheless decenters whiteness, with the Black characters often obscuring them. Thus we are well prepared, though we may still gasp, when late in the second act Noah asks if he and Caroline can ever again be friends.Her answer is crushing: “Weren’t never friends.”That huge lesson in the boy’s life, a lesson the actual boy evidently took to heart, is but a moment in Caroline’s. The story does not end with him but with her and her family. If this is an admirable insight from white authors, keep in mind that the musical was strongly shaped by Black artists as well, among them the original director, George C. Wolfe, and his Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Their imprint is everywhere.Now Clarke, who won an Olivier award for her performance in the British production, adds hers. She makes of the maid an almost Shakespearean figure; even at the depths of the character’s despair, in the scarifying 11 o’clock number “Lot’s Wife,” she commands attention without begging for it, and does not allow herself, because Caroline wouldn’t, the luxury of collapse.The result of that restraint is more painful than cathartic, leaving the story’s emotional release to those who can afford it: Caroline’s children. The chance to believe in change is her hard-won bequest to them — and, in this devastating, uncomfortable, crucial musical, to us.Caroline, or ChangeThrough Jan. 9 at Studio 54, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      For Sharon D Clarke, a ‘Big Sing’ and a Big Broadway Moment

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      The Olivier Award winner stars in “Caroline, or Change” in a role that pays tribute to “all Black women trying to make their way through this life.”Fifty floors above street level, in her temporary Manhattan apartment with its panoramic views, the West End theater star Sharon D Clarke was missing her wife.Clarke has, it’s true, an enviably glamorous career. Exhibit A at the moment is her title role in Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” at Studio 54. But that’s no buffer against waking alone too early in a strange bed, not yet adjusted to the time difference between New York and London, or making your Broadway debut without the love of your life in the audience, her perfect two-decade record of being there on your shows’ first night ruined by a Covid travel ban.“To be on Broadway and to not have my wife, and to not be able to share that with her, was hard,” Clarke said the day after the first preview of “Caroline,” her eyes welling above a chic purple mask. “Because there’s so much joy in that, you know?”In fairness, she had been talking animatedly for an hour and a half before she let any tears fall, and then only because she was still so moved by a visit the night before from a friend: Wendell Pierce, who played Willy Loman to her Linda in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019. He flew in from Louisiana to see the performance and surprise her afterward, knowing that, in the absence of her wife, she would need someone else in the audience who loved her.Clarke and Wendell Pierce in a 2019 production of “Death of a Salesman,” for which she won her third Olivier Award last year.Brinkhoff-MoegenburgClarke’s turn as Linda Loman won her the most recent of her three Olivier Awards. Her second, the year before, was for playing Caroline Thibodeaux in “Caroline, or Change,” a role she has lived with since Michael Longhurst’s 2017 production at Chichester Festival Theater.It moved to London, then into the West End. There, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, the show achieved “the titanic dimensions of greatness,” while Clarke delivered “a climactic aria that seems to shake the theater’s very foundations.”“Caroline’s a big sing,” Clarke said, casually understating the scope and intensity of the role’s vocal demands. When the show was new, Kushner worried that no one but Tonya Pinkins, the actor the part was written for, would ever be able to do it.“Sharon is a genuinely great artist,” Kushner said. “Both Jeanine and I felt, immediately when we saw her at Chichester: OK, we have to get this performance over to New York. People have to see it.”So over Clarke came, to re-create Longhurst’s production with an American cast for Roundabout Theater Company — the first Broadway revival of a musical whose original run, in 2004, lasted only 136 performances. In March 2020, the show was a day from its first preview when the industry shut down.In Clarke’s experience, the fullness with which Caroline is written makes her unique among Black female lead roles: “an ordinary citizen” — not the subject of a bioplay, or a character who is an entertainer — depicted with nuance, complexity and a deep well of emotion. A divorced mother of four in 1963, Caroline works as a maid for the Gellmans, a Jewish family in Lake Charles, La. Doing laundry in a basement “16 feet below sea level,” as the opening song goes, she earns too little money to keep her own family above water.Noah Gellman, an 8-year-old missing his dead mother, Betty, worships Caroline. In Clarke’s invented back story, Caroline and Betty used to smoke cigarettes together in the basement, and Betty is the one who bought the nice washing machine, to ease Caroline’s workload.But Rose, Noah’s new stepmother, can’t even get Caroline’s name right. She calls her Carolyn.“I remember doing a Q.&A., and funny enough, it was with some Americans in London,” Clarke said. “And the white woman said to me something like, ‘Well, we didn’t quite understand why Caroline was so mad at Rose.’ And I was like, OK. Wow.“I said, ‘You work with someone who never calls you by your name. Never. How does that make you feel? And this is a new person coming into a household who thinks it’s all right to just call you what the hell they think your name is, and she’s supposed to be grateful for that, and you don’t have a problem with that? That’s not something that’s occurred to you?’”Clarke as Caroline, with Adam Makké as Noah and Arica Jackson as the washing machine, in the musical, which is now in previews.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt is especially important to Clarke that the audience has the full length of the musical to understand the myriad reasons for Caroline’s mostly suppressed rage, so “people didn’t come away just going, ‘Oh, angry Black woman.’”“Every time Rose calls her Carolyn, I make her flinch,” Clarke said. “Every time.”The daughter of a seamstress and a carpenter, Clarke sees playing Caroline as “a chance to honor all maids, all women, all single mothers, all Black women trying to make their way through this life.”“In a way for me,” she added, “it’s honoring my mum, who left Jamaica in the ’50s to come to England to forge a new way for us in a society that didn’t want them. You know: ‘No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs.’”Racism and the accelerating fight for civil rights are central themes in “Caroline, or Change,” whose Broadway premiere was directed by George C. Wolfe and starred Pinkins in the title role, with Anika Noni Rose as Caroline’s fiery teenage daughter, Emmie.Tesori, who said Clarke is “a beautiful collaborator,” is struck by a particular quality she believes Clarke and Pinkins have in common.“These women who take center stage,” she said, “I always feel like they’re incredibly fragile and incredibly enduring. There is something about their ability to go what I call D.F.C., down [expletive] center, and own it. There is no question about whether they should be there.”Kushner based the show partly on his own childhood in Lake Charles, and Caroline loosely on Maudie Lee Davis, who worked for his family and gave him permission to dedicate it to her. Out of all he has written, he said, “I think it’s my favorite thing.”He was in London for rehearsals of “Angels in America” at the National Theater in 2017 when Longhurst invited him to what he said would be a very rough run-through of the first act of “Caroline.” He warned that Clarke, who was starring in a West End show at the time, would not be singing full out. Yet Kushner, then new to her work, thought it was “one of the most electrifying performances I’ve ever seen.”“She has this sort of adamantine presence onstage. And that weird ability that great actors have to sort of say, ‘OK, now you’re all going to feel this because I’m feeling it,’” he said. “I’ve never seen her not be completely present and putting herself through the very difficult things that the part requires, not just vocally but also emotionally.”Longhurst, who called Clarke “a deep joy,” said that in the Chichester production, she would not start rehearsing until she had hugged everyone in the room.“Less than a week in,” he said, “she had the full company just in awe of her and, you know, led with love. That’s how she does it.”Such personal warmth helps when the musical, in his phrasing, “goes to an extreme place” with an explosive confrontation between Caroline and Noah, a role shared by three boys who alternate performances. Clarke’s connection with them is vital.“The kid has to sort of feel safe to say those things to her and know that she knows that it’s acting,” Longhurst said.But it’s a fanciful show, too, where Caroline’s appliances come to life, and her children end Act One with a sweet, infectious fantasy number involving a singing moon.Because of growth spurts and cracking voices, “Caroline” had to replace some of its child actors post-shutdown. But Clarke knew throughout that she had the show to return to — which she said made a “ten thousandfold” difference to her mental state amid the industry’s dormancy.After a few months back in London with her wife, Susie McKenna, a director, Clarke started getting voice-over work, which took the pressure off creatively and financially.“It’s a hard thing to say to people, but lockdown? I really enjoyed it,” she said. “We’ve just been able to cook and dance around the kitchen and live.”They took weekslong trips to their house in Spain, and for the first time they didn’t have just one day off at Christmas in a calendar crammed with shows. (They met, in 1999, doing a “Cinderella” pantomime.)So last month, when Clarke came back to “Caroline” — after she and some British members of the creative team endured a visa-approval delay so lengthy that Roundabout asked Senator Chuck Schumer’s office to intervene — she felt refreshed, if not “match fit for eight shows a week,” she said.“You kind of have to build back up that stamina, and you can only do that by doing the show,” Clarke said of performing eight shows a week after such a long break.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“It’s just like being a tennis player and not having a match for a year and a half, and then going, ‘Oh, I’ve got the big match with Steffi Graf today!’” she said. “You kind of have to build back up that stamina, and you can only do that by doing the show.”Clarke admires the way that Broadway theaters shut down “as a community” and are opening back up the same way, with none of the haphazard stop-and-start that has bedeviled London stages.For her, though, New York was never the aspiration — even if she did tour clubs here a few decades ago as the singer for the briefly Billboard chart-topping group Nomad. Clarke decided long ago that she was not going to be one of the many Black British actors who go to the United States in search of a better career than they can build at home.“If we all leave, you can brush us under the carpet and go, ‘Oh, there are not the people here to do the work. We don’t have the talent,’” she said. “No. We’re here. I’m going to stay and be in that front line so that you remember that we’re here.”On the other hand? She would not mind spending enough time in the United States to “do a nice TV series or a movie, earn some decent money, take a year out and eat our way around the world.”She and McKenna have wanted to do that since well before their pandemic rediscovery of leisure.“But now even more so,” Clarke said. “Plus, you know, with the way that the world is going, I want to see the Barrier Reef while there’s still something left to see.” More