26 May 2018 Saturday

[scenicdesign71]

My first daily!  (on this board, anyway; I think I might have started one or two on the old FTC, though I wouldn't even swear to that).

Still thinking about Carousel from the other night -- a beautiful but perplexing mixture of gorgeously apt elements and oddly clunky or uninspired ones.  The material's cringeworthy aspects are never satisfactorily reckoned-with -- despite a few timid attempts to soften them, and an underrated performance by Jessie Mueller that, just as much as Joshua Henry's, cries out for a surer-footed, better-integrated production to contain it.

Rather than expound at length, I'll recommend a couple of the reviews that I found most interesting: the Village Voice's Michael Feingold (thank god he's back); and a new favorite of mine, New York magazine's Sara Holdren:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/04/19/a-carousel-revival-attempts-new-spins-on-rodgers-and-hammersteins-classic-musical/

http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/theater-review-can-carousel-be-brought-around.html

Between the two, they capture some of my feelings about the performance I saw on Wednesday night; perhaps at some point I'll try and set down some of the rest.  Flaws notwithstanding, I wouldn't mind seeing it again, if Broadway weren't so ungodly expensive.

But the evening did put me in mind of my one prior experience with the show:

I could kick myself for not having seen Nicholas Hytner's legendary National Theatre revival when it came to New York.  But missing it at least had the helpful effect of leaving my mind wide-open when I designed a tiny production of Carousel a few years later which, for all its rinky-dink summer-stock-ness, remains among my favorite (of my own) designs -- and among my favorite experiences more generally.  Given the overwhelming difference in scale, there's no real way I could've imitated Bob Crowley's work even if I had seen it.  But precisely because of the overwhelming difference in scale, even having his design anywhere in the back of my brain might easily have proved paralyzing in the face of such limited resources -- so in retrospect I'm glad that I hadn't even seen photos of it at that point.

Which isn't to say I knew absolutely nothing about the Hytner/Crowley production.  Despite having my head buried in graduate school in 1994 when it opened at Lincoln Center, a few abstract descriptions had penetrated my sleep-deprived fog -- it was a "dark," "magical," surreal yet sociologically-gritty "revisal," with visual infusions of Grant Wood and Shaker blue -- some of which did filter vaguely into my thinking about the show when I subsequently sat down to design it in the summer of 1998.  Nevertheless, another year or two after that, when I did at last see some photos of Mr. Crowley's designs (remember, this was all essentially pre-Internet), I was actually startled by just how unrecognizably different -- without even touching the issues of scale or budget -- two Carousels could be.

All of which, in turn, makes me want to dig up my old designs for that production, and do something at long last about making a portfolio website.  Just as soon as I've got Grey Gardens here under control.  (Not the show -- I wish;  GG is just my nickname for the disaster that is my apartment).