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The punning title therefore prepares us for an evening thick with dualities, indecisiveness, and either-ors.
But Kushner could have accomplished all of that without punctuation.
So I think his comma does (at least) three things.
And third, the comma makes you literally pause.
These also happen to be the three gestures of the musical itself.
In its queasy quasi-nostalgia,Caroline, or Changelooks backward, both at Kushners childhood and our countrys adolescence.
Itweighs,carefully and respectfully, the heaviest moment of a life.
And it stops us: It puts a restraining hand on our arm as we rush past.
The pause is always sacred in Kushners work because a pause is a space for thought.
Nothing ever happen underground in Louisiana / Cause they aint no underground in Louisiana.
(In the Gellmans white household, everything that serves them even the machines are Black.)
Noah likes to join Caroline down among the appliances, even though she gives him little encouragement.
Shes grouchy with him, but he worships her.
(Three actors alternate in Noahs role.
I saw Adam Makke.)
Itll be like a raise!
Like Noah pays a share of your salary, she warbles unconfidently.
Michael Longhursts production has traveled far to get here.
NKenges voice as the Moon is soaring, pure, effortless, gorgeous.
Cariani sounds strained when he sings to Noah but passionate and free when hes playing his beloved clarinet.
(Cariani is actually playing the clarinet, not pretending.)
But Clarkes voice seems to be dragged out of her almost against her will.
you could hear weariness in it the bigger it gets; you could hear gravel and blood.
Perhaps the city is ready for it now.
It certainly seems so exactly tailored to this moment that I kept checking the script.
Had they changed it?
When we return from intermission, we briefly see the remains of the mangled statue.
Like its lost cause, it is ruined and broken but not gone.
the Gellmans sing, hilariously, when Roses father starts a dinner-table jeremiad about abandoning nonviolence.
Kushner was also treating the slow way the transformations of the civil-rights movement seeped into the Louisiana water table.
Eighteen years ago, the musical had a little more … hope in it.
Longhursts production is therefore brave enough not to brighten, not even at the curtain call.
Im gonna slam that iron down on my heart, Caroline cries.
Gonna slam that iron down on my throat, gonna slam that iron down on my sex.
The show cant recover from this intensity; certainly, we cannot.
Caroline, or Changeis at the Roundabout at Studio 54 through January 9.
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