CAROUSEL 1994 Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway Holiday Card feat, L.C.T. revivial

Description

CAROUSEL 1994 Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway Holiday Card feat, L.C.T. revivial Joan Marcus Photo featuring cast members Michael Hayden, Jeff Weiss, Lauren Ward and members from the production.  8 3/4" x 5 1/2"
Lincoln Center Theater, by arrangement with Cameron Mackintosh and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization presented a re-creation of The Royal National Theatre's acclaimed 1993 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's CAROUSEL. Its stunning combination of bleakness and humanity seemed well-suited to our time. This was a revisionist version of a beloved work that still manages to honor the spirit of the original. Human, dark, and unsentimental, with beautiful yet abstract modern scenery, this production was a young director's version for the 1990s that introduced new generations to this wonderful show. This was not another routine revival, but an artistic rethinking of CAROUSEL that valued acting as much as singing, and bore a clear sense of the time in American history against which the show is set. - L.C.T.
Excerpted
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicholas Hytner directed a new production of
Carousel
in 1992, at London's Royal National Theatre, with choreography by Sir Kenneth MacMillan and designs by Bob Crowley. In this staging, the story begins at the mill, where Julie and Carrie work, with the music slowed down to emphasize the drudgery. After work ends, they move to the shipyards and then to the carnival.
As they proceed on a revolving stage, carnival characters appear, and at last the carousel is assembled onstage for the girls to ride.
Louise is seduced by the ruffian boy during her Act 2 ballet, set around the ruins of a carousel.
Michael Hayden played Billy not as a large, gruff man, but as a frustrated smaller one, a time bomb waiting to explode.
Hayden, Joanna Riding (Julie) and Janie Dee (Carrie) all won Olivier Awards for their performances.
Patricia Routledge played Nettie.
Enoch and Carrie were cast as an interracial couple whose eight children, according to the review in
The New York Times
, looked like "a walking United Colors of Benetton ad".
Clive Rowe, as Enoch, was nominated for an Olivier Award.
The production's limited run from December 1992 through March 1993 was a sellout.
It re-opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London in September 1993, presented by Cameron Mackintosh, where it continued until May 1994.
The Hytner production moved to New York's Vivian Beaumont Theater, where it opened on March 24, 1994, and ran for 322 performances.
This won five Tony Awards, including best musical revival, as well as awards for Hytner, MacMillan, Crowley and Audra McDonald (as Carrie).
The cast also included Sally Murphy as Julie, Shirley Verrett as Nettie, Fisher Stevens as Jigger and Eddie Korbich as Enoch.
One change made from the London to the New York production was to have Billy strike Louise across the face, rather than on the hand. According to Hayden, "He does the one unpardonable thing, the thing we can't forgive. It's a challenge for the audience to like him after that."
The Hytner
Carousel
was presented in Japan in May 1995.
A U.S. national tour with a scaled-down production began in February 1996 in Houston and closed in May 1997 in Providence, Rhode Island. Producers sought to feature young talent on the tour,
with Patrick Wilson as Billy and Sarah Uriarte Berry,
and later Jennifer Laura Thompson, as Julie.