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Carousel, Opera North
Gillene Herbert (Julie Jordan) and Eric Greene (Billy Bigelow) in Opera North's Carousel, 'an uncomplicated and excellent pleasure'. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Gillene Herbert (Julie Jordan) and Eric Greene (Billy Bigelow) in Opera North's Carousel, 'an uncomplicated and excellent pleasure'. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Carousel; Einstein on the Beach – review

This article is more than 11 years old
Leeds Grand Theatre; Barbican theatre, London

Take your choice: a sunny, well-drilled, all-singing, all-dancing chorus line gloriously "bustin' out all over" in swing skirts and boaters, or an immaculate, impervious vocal ensemble, stock still in white shirts, sitting in semi-darkness in the orchestra pit chanting the numbers one to eight while, for variation, another voice sets up its own slow count of "1, 2, 3, 4" and a keyboard spills out repeated arpeggio patterns.

Three decades separate Rodgers and Hammerstein's hit musical Carousel (1945) and Philip Glass's cult opera-cum-installation Einstein on the Beach (1976), two contrasting American classics which opened in the UK last week. In those intervening years, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, President Kennedy was assassinated, man walked on the moon, and the 60s and Vietnam happened – random events essential to mid-20th-century history and unquestionably dominating the childhood and early adulthood of the impressionable young Glass (born 1937).

You could debate long and hard whether the subsequent decades, from the mid-1970s until now, offer comparable unrest. I doubt it, notwithstanding obvious political and technological cataclysms. In cultural terms, the shocks provoked by Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez or Terry Riley had already occurred. Experimentalism was the norm but no one had ditched narrative or embraced hypnotic repetition with quite such insouciance and pizazz as Glass and his collaborator, the theatre innovator Robert Wilson. It is impossible to imagine the impact their four-act, storyless stage work, connected by five "knee plays" or interludes, must have had at its first performance in Avignon, France in the heatwave summer of 1976.

Encountering the two works within less than 24 hours – the Glass in a technically disrupted performance at London's Barbican Centre, Carousel in Leeds – was discombobulating: a jerky, reverse gallop through the emerging musical language of America, bypassing Cage and Bernstein but sensing both their response to Broadway and their influence on a radical new generation that included Glass. The heartfelt lyricism of What's the Use of Wond'rin'? and the cool confusion of "The ones the th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th-th", to take a typical line from Einstein, are, you could say, light years apart. It was like trying to get to grips with the American novel with only a suave Raymond Chandler thriller and some anarchic William Burroughs as your exemplars, or précis-ing American art by leaping straight from Edward Hopper's sober naturalism to the dazzling minimalism of Sol LeWitt.

Opera North's Carousel, to deal chronologically, was an uncomplicated and excellent pleasure. The company now has a long established tradition of performing musical and operetta alongside heavier repertoire. The show's director, Jo Davies, had a great success with Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore (revived and toured last season), and the decision to invite her back was more than justified. The stylishly compact set and costume designs by Anthony Ward, lit by Bruno Poet, were updated a few years to the early 20th century with a clever solution for the carousel itself – spinning lights and fairground horses on a revolve, with no cumbersome, interconnecting engine work – and plenty of visual delights for young and old alike.

This being the work of an opera company, musical standards were uppermost, with the orchestra on crisp form, sparklingly conducted by James Holmes. I found the dialogue painfully stilted and awkward but no doubt it will begin to flow more easily, ready for a month-long residency at the Barbican in August/September. The sequence in heaven, when Billy has a chance to redeem himself, remains mawkish but that is a weakness of the book, not this staging.

In the lead roles of Julie and Carrie, the young singers Gillene Herbert and Claire Boulter hit the notes with ease, and were also, as required, funny, touching and charming. The American Eric Greene played the troubled anti-hero Billy Bigelow sympathetically, though not yet quite convincingly: we need to understand exactly why Julie falls for him in that first brief encounter. Joe Shovelton's wittily tedious Mr Snow and Michael Rouse's sly Jigger were neatly done. The chorus was robust and cheerful, and Elena Ferrari (Nettie) sang You'll Never Walk Alone without syrup or undue sentiment. Did I cry? Did I just.

Perhaps a few who turned up at the much-hyped UK premiere production at the Barbican had encountered Einstein before but for most of us it was a first chance to experience live what we knew only by short extract or reputation. This combination of dance, theatre, song and light show is immersive and captivating but you have to be there to make any sense of it at all. Evan Davis, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, no doubt spoke for many when he admitted having bought the 4-disc box set years ago after hearing it used in an Orange advert but never having managed to sit through the whole thing.

The level of concentration required to perform this work defies imagination. The actor Kate Moran was phenomenal in her tongue-twistingly repeated "I was in this prematurely air-conditioned super market" sequence. All the musicians, conducted by Glass veteran Michael Riesman and including a virtuosic tenor sax solo by Andrew Sterman, showed exemplary stamina as well as musicality. Frustratingly, the first night was beset with mechanical difficulties, turning an already long event into an endurance test, despite the brilliance of the performers and the thrill – yes, you read the word correctly – of the work. The dances, highlights of the evening and, in the sense of being about bodies moving through space, the closest you get to any Einstein theorising, were by the work's original choreographer, Lucinda Childs, and performed by her company. The physicist himself was portrayed by violinist Antoine Silverman, who wore a wig and, after his mesmerising performance, stuck his tongue out as in the famous 1951 portrait.

By all accounts Einstein would have been completely useless in Glass's opera. As the sign pinned up in his Princeton office announced: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Proving the point, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein used to tell the story – always worth repeating – of playing sonatas with Einstein, a more than proficient violinist. When Einstein came in four beats late in a particular passage, and repeated the error when they played it again, Rubinstein yelled "Albert, Albert, for God's sake, can't you even count up to four?"

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