Carousel – review

I've always thought there's a dodgy brilliance to Carousel. Musically it is far and away the most sophisticated of the Rodgers and Hammerstein operettas, yet lyrically it comes perilously close to acceptance of the inevitability of domestic violence. The great virtue of Jo Davies's Opera North revival is that it addresses these issues head-on rather than sweeping them under the carpet.

The opening carousel waltz is not only beautifully staged, with the glittering elements of Anthony Ward's set slowly coming into place – the pantomime-ballet is also used to trace Billy Bigelow's growth from abused, vagrant boy into adult fairground barker. Without entering a plea of diminished responsibility, Davies implies that Billy's violence had specific social origins. Her production also sharpens the show's contrast between two different kinds of marriage in a 1915 New England fishing village. The one between Billy and the mutinous mill-hand, Julie Jordan, is tempestuous, transient and volatile. That between Julie's friend, Carrie, and the deeply bourgeois Enoch Snow is settled and fertile but, as shown by their secret visits to Broadway burlesque shows, based on a certain sexual hypocrisy.

These contrasts are underscored by the performances. Michael Todd Simpson, who has sung Don Giovanni in America, is an outstanding Billy: darkly menacing yet not without a certain self-awareness as when he claims, during the famous eight-minute Soliloquy, "you can have fun with a son but you've got to be a father to a girl". Katherine Manley also endows Julie with a moody rebelliousness that suggests she's well matched with a social outcast such as Billy. Sarah Tynan's perkily prim Carrie and Joseph Shovelton's fiercely acquisitive Mr Snow offer a wonderfully comic counterpoint to the main couple, and Yvonne Howard rescues that overblown anthem, You'll Never Walk Alone, from its churchy and footballing associations. Even if I craved a bit more textual clarity in the big ensemble numbers, this is easily the best Carousel since Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre revival nearly 20 years ago.