Carousel review – musical reimaginings

Carousel - credit QNQ Creative

Looking for love: Carousel at the Arcola. Credit: QNQ Creative

With its somersaulting circus performers, ballet dancers, orchestra, big number showtunes and emotion to rival a soap opera, you would be forgiven for wondering how Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel could contort itself to fit into the utilitarian studio space of the Arcola.

It is an ambitious undertaking, but Luke Fredericks’ direction manages to tame the carnival. In fact, the intimacy of the theatre – with the elevated orchestra merely feet away and dancers threatening to spill into the audience – gives this show by Morphic Graffiti a thrilling sense of abandon.

Fredericks re-imagines the musical by setting it against the backdrop of the Great Depression, emphasising the hardship of life in a 1930s New England coastal town.

The plot follows millworker Julie Jordan (Gemma Sutton) who becomes seduced by the sleazy glamour of a nearby fairground and its resident bad boy, angry carousel barker Billy Bigelow (Tim Rogers) and their ill-fated relationship.

Carousel is a bittersweet affair. Its light-hearted scenes see an abundance of thigh-slapping dance routines and bawdy seaside humour, epitomised by the upwardly mobile fisherman Enoch Snow (Joel Montague) and his sparky and entertaining wife played by the exuberant Vicki Lee Taylor.

The darker moments come from the town’s underworld and the shady types who cling to the seedy glamour of the carousel. The circus dancers that open the show are excellent but the gangsters are mere comedy ‘baddies’, made worse by a few feeble attempts at New England accents.

But Carousel is worth a visit just to witness Gemma Sutton’s understated and affecting performance of Julie as a tender-hearted yet defiant young woman dedicated to her wayward husband. Handed a series of bleeding-heart numbers she manages to convey emotion without melodrama, her voice even bringing audience members in the front row to tears.

Carousel is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 19 July.