Carousel, Leeds Grand Theatre, review: 'full of moments of grace'

Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1945 operetta, is not the sunny slice of light entertainment its title suggests. Rather it is an uncomfortable and emotionally sophisticated portrait of a dirt-poor couple’s volatile marriage in New England in the late 19th century.

The story is a celestial twist on boy meets girl. Julie and Billy, a carousel barker, get married, have a baby and fight. Following a botched robbery, Billy dies, after which a heavenly body gives him one chance to make amends to his now 15-year-old daughter, who has suffered her entire life because of his reputation. Yet even when dead, impetuous Billy can’t stop himself lashing out. It’s a detail typical of a show that strives to juxtapose psychological complexity with the heart-swelling possibility of redemption.

Jo Davies’s stripped back production for Opera North, now set in 1915 (apparently to blow away the fussiness that a Victorian setting demands), is in robust shape. Carousel contains perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most exquisite score and conductor James Holmes, with the help of a full orchestra, fully realises its ripe expressiveness and sinister undernotes. Keith Higham’s Billy, a swaggering mix of menace, unpredictability and self-loathing, is tremendous in his stand out song, Soliloquy, in which he voices his prescient fear of proving unworthy to a future child. Gillene Butterfield’s Julie provides decent support, although you miss, perhaps, a detailed sense of what brought this pair together. And she is upstaged by Aiofe O'Sullivan’s delightfully spirited Carrie whose marriage to the uptight Mr Snow is a source of comic delight.

^{Alex Newton as Louise in Opera North's Carousel. PHOTO: Alastair Muir}

But while the singing is faultless, the acting is not. Two crucial moments – the first where Billy is fatally apprehended after the robbery, the second where he hits out at his daughter – are ineptly handled. Anthony Ward’s set is handsome but could have gone further to summon the hand to mouth struggle of New England poverty.

Yet Davies’s production is full of moments of grace: the scene in which Billy and Julie fall in love under softly dripping blossom; the one where Billy watches from afar the daughter he has yet to meet dancing; the triumphant rescue of You’ll Never Walk Alone from the Liverpool FC terraces in a soul-soaring performance by Yvonne Howard who plays Nettie Fowler. Best of all is What’s the Use of Wond’rin’, about why good girls fall in love with bad boys and in which Butterfield and the ensemble beautifully blend notes of consolation with sorrowful resignation.

Until May 23 then touring. Tickets: 0333 257 8704; carouseltheshow.com