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Carnival!
A
Kennedy Center presentation of a musical in one act, with music and
lyrics by Bob Merrill, book by Michael Stewart, based on material by
Helen Deutsch. Book revisions by Francine Pascal. Directed,
choreographed by Robert Longbottom. Music director, David Chase. Carefully selected and meticulously mounted revivals have become a Kennedy Center trademark under chieftain Michael Kaiser. As in the center's Sondheim and Tennessee Williams festivals, it delivers exclusive runs of full-scale productions that generally meet high standards. Such is the case with this dazzling $4 million show, which has a 24-piece orchestra and not a single corner shaved. "Carnival!" is the disarming tale of an innocent young girl swept up in the seedy world of a traveling French circus, where she falls prey to one licentious performer and enchants a shy puppeteer. It is an unabashedly sentimental yet timeless piece that never confuses good and evil. Merrill's varied score features catchy melodies highlighted by the evergreen "Love Makes the World Go Round." Show has been trimmed to a brisk two hours and change with the elimination of one number ("A Very Nice Man"), one minor character and the intermission. Book revisions were made by author Francine Pascal, sister of the late Stewart. The talented cast assembled for this three-week run was in high gear on opening night, starting with the most innocent of ingenues played by relative unknown Ereni Sevasti. A real catch for the role of Lili, she introduces her pure soprano right off in the sweet number, "Mira," and from then on, never stops charming the audience. Other principals include Sebastian La Cause as the deliciously pompous cad, Marco the magician. He and his perpetually jealous assistant (Natascia Diaz) keep the slender plot churning as they spar over affections and entertain with big numbers including "Magic, Magic." Jonathan Lee Iverson is also full of bombast as the circus owner and ringmaster. In this conflicting carnival world of joyous make-believe and bitter reality, the heart of the show beats around the adorable puppets, designed by Ed Christie, who assists actors Jim Stanek (as the embittered Paul) and Michael Arnold (as his earnest assistant Jacquot) in their performances. Seems that Paul can only voice his deepest feelings through his puppets, a true inconvenience when trying to woo the sensitive Lili. But the pair and friends combine for plenty of magic, including the numbers, "Yum Ticky Ticky Tum Tum" and "Beautiful Candy." Under Longbottom's intricate staging, the action is a nonstop parade of circus acts and shenanigans, embellished with athletic ensemble choreography inserted among juggling, tumbling and rope tricks. Even the dancing bears get to show their fancy steps. Then the mood shifts adroitly when things get serious. It's all topped with extremely colorful and lavish sets by Andrew Jackness and costumes from Paul Tazewell in a production lit to perfection by Ken Billington. How elaborate is this musical? Its expensive props include two puppet theaters and 16 puppets. Stunned auds get to see a complicated circus set with lights assembled in seconds before their eyes, surely a logistical feat on the Eisenhower stage. Director's Polishing Puts a High Sheen on 'Carnival!'  By Peter Marks Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 26, 2007 No musical in recent years has looked or sounded better on a Kennedy Center stage than the revival of "Carnival!," the tender 1961 love story, set to Bob Merrill's score, that has been buffed to a ravishing sheen by director Robert Longbottom. To put on a show that is all about illusions -- the creating of them as well as the dashing of them -- the Kennedy Center has come to the right man. Longbottom, who has ample experience in the spectacle genre, both as a director at Radio City Music Hall and with the 1997 Broadway musical "Side Show," brings a gimlet eye to this fragile and peculiar romantic fable of a despairing puppeteer and the naive gamine who restores him. In concert with a superior design team -- Andrew Jackness (sets), Paul Tazewell (costumes) and Ken Billington (lighting) -- Longbottom places the ragtag characters of the traveling Parisian circus in that weird, carnival world of contrived happiness. This is a midway of both enchantment and desperation, of beguiling acts and harsh realities: a magician who serially cheats on his assistant; a ringmaster of more than ordinary stinginess; a puppeteer who resents his puppets. It's so right for Jackness to put the road-show circus on versatile, rolling set pieces that fly across the Eisenhower stage. And so apt to paint the sky above it as moody gray tufts. No matter how flashily Tazewell festoons the carny workers, or how gaudily the jugglers' and acrobats' faces are made up, this circus operates not only under the big top but also under a cloud. The hazard in all the backstage agita of "Carnival!" is that Michael Stewart's book for the musical flirts with an all-too-heavy-heartedness. Owing to its morose hero Paul (Jim Stanek), a dancer whose war injuries have forced him to pursue a lowlier career in sideshow puppetry, the work is swathed in the character's dank mist of disappointment. Add to this the sadness in the background of enigmatic Lili (Ereni Sevasti), an orphan who shows up at the midway guileless and destitute, and there is the potential for a surefire downer. Fortunately, one also has Merrill's lovely score, rife with affecting ballads ("Mira," "She's My Love") and pleasing circus numbers ("A Sword and a Rose and a Cape," "Beautiful Candy"). Longbottom, too, working with Stewart's surviving sister, Francine Pascal, has removed some of the starch by trimming the book and one of Lili's early numbers, "A Very Nice Man." And the performances of Stanek and particularly the splendid Sevasti appealingly highlight the parallel searches Paul and Lili are on, for some understanding of where in this alienating universe they truly belong. Her hair boyishly short and her costume a simple blue dress that accentuates Lili's outsider status, Sevasti makes a delightful case for a child-woman gradually shedding her innocence. (Her appearance seems a homage to Leslie Caron, who played the character in the 1953 movie "Lili," on which the musical is based.) Lili is first attracted to the musky Marco the Magnificent (Sebastian La Cause), an oily rogue forever betraying faithful doormat Rosalie (Natascia Diaz), who assists him in his magic act. Later, though, Lili's affections shift to Paul and his puppet retinue, a quartet of characters beautifully designed by Ed Christie, through which bitter Paul is able to express his sensitive side. Lili responds to the puppets, and especially Paul's alter ego Carrot Top, as if they were real, and the way in which Sevasti's eyes meet theirs sustains the sweet mystery of trying to read Lili on the maturity meter. She is described as a "grown-up girl with the mind of a child," and as we are taken through this gritty little tale, we come to accept that she's traumatized rather than disabled, as anyone might be who has been separated from the only home she's known. Stanek and Sevasti sing touchingly and with technical prowess, particularly in their final duet. Diaz's Rosalie is a winning comic creation and La Cause prowls with a big reptile's muscular grace. Marco's tricks, designed by Joe Eddie Fairchild, are an amusing array of stock sleight-of-hand, from the pre-David Copperfield era of dagger-throwing and swords shoved into a box. At the same time, however, the excessive smugness with which La Cause invests Marco comes across as grimness rather than charm. Marco isn't a magnetic alternative here to Paul, as much as a brooding fellow traveler. As a result, we're drawn even more powerfully to the character who reveals the most heart, Paul's assistant, Jacquot. Michael Arnold's superb portrayal is even more effective for all its quiet restraint. It is given to Jacquot the task of explaining to Paul that Lili is a girl of deep feeling, and Arnold's delivery of the news of Lili's love for the puppets is one of the production's most heartbreaking moments. Jacquot also gets a production number, the fantasy song "Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris," and it's choreographed with aplomb by Longbottom. (His dances for Marco's earlier, elaborate number, "A Sword and a Rose and a Cape," evoke the old-Broadway panache of Jerome Robbins.) If the Kennedy Center's goal here was to dress a difficult, neglected work in a coat of contemporary artistry, the aim has been achieved. No doubt about it: Longbottom makes this poignant world go 'round. Taking a Chance on A Wide-Eyed Heroine By Scott Vogel Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 16, 2007
Coincidence? No matter, says the Kennedy Center, which is exactly what you'd think the institution would say. This is, after all, the place that never met a show it considered unrevivable, and if recent exhumations haven't exactly proved the wisdom of that attitude (see "The Subject Was Roses," "Mame"), the center's cockeyed optimism remains undaunted, its aesthetic eyes as wide as saucers. One of the happy beneficiaries of this credulity is Ereni Sevasti, a young New Jersey native who, despite being completely unknown outside her environs, was cast as Lili by director Robert Longbottom (who, come to think of it, successfully helmed the hitherto-unrevivable "Mister Roberts" in 2005). Like Lili, who joins a traveling French carnival on a whim, Sevasti had almost no idea what she was getting herself into. At least not last week, when reached by phone at her home in Jersey. At that moment, she had never performed a lead role in a major production, had visited the Eisenhower Theater only once and, most crucially, had yet to see those giant banners -- whipping fiercely in the February wind outside the Kennedy Center -- depicting her as a girl in a straw hat transfixed by the midway. "I come from a big, fat Greek family," Sevasti said, "and I actually don't think they get it yet." The daughter of a construction worker and a real estate agent, and the youngest of four siblings, the 24-year-old actress has the sort of r?sum? ("I understudied for Liesl and Luisa in Paper Mill Playhouse's 'Sound of Music' ") that might inspire alarm. But then you hear about Sevasti's rehearsal experience, at which point it begins to seem like a bit of casting genius was involved. "The creative team that we're working with, from the sets to the costumes to the puppets to the magic -- it's just too beautiful!" Sevasti said. "We have some jugglers, some aerialists. . . . It's going to be a spectacle. I'm not kidding!" If jugglers and aerialists have long ceased to enchant you, then you've never heard Sevasti on the subject, a monologue that leaves you -- take my word for it -- believing again in the possibilities of circus life. And it's worth noting that the original Broadway production, led by legendary impresario Gower Champion, won over a skeptical New York crowd, too, with its "power to renew tarnished pleasures," as the Times put it. The story itself, of Lili's infatuation with magician Marco the Magnificent (here played by Sebastian La Cause) even as she is wooed by Paul the socially challenged puppeteer (Jim Stanek), is not one of Broadway's most compelling, but there are a few wonderful songs. Among the most charming is Lili's first, "Mira," where she introduces herself thus: I come from a town, the kind of town, where you live in the house 'til the house falls down, but if it stands up you stay there. It's funny but that's their way there. "It's a throwback to what life was like when it was beautiful in her home, when she had a home," Sevasti noted. "Now she's parentless and lonely and looking for someone. Unfortunately, the first person she sees is Marco." Sevasti herself was luckier, running into noted Manhattan acting instructor William Esper ("brilliant teachers have a way of getting to know you on the level you need to be understood," she said) and enrolling in a two-year program at his studio before beating out scores of actresses during open auditions for "Carnival!" in New York and Washington in the fall. It has all happened a bit quickly for Sevasti -- "I still have moments where I'm just weak" -- but she's smart enough to know that, for an actress channeling Lili, a little vulnerability is all to the good. "Everyone was wondering why there wasn't a name in the role," she said. "I don't know! I'm just happy they decided to go the way they did." Carnival! Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater 202-467-4600 Saturday through March 11 |
Ereni Sevasti stars as an innocent ingenue amid a seedy circus in the Kennedy Center production of 'Carnival!'
Naivete
-- as charming as the trait remains in our cynic-soaked world -- is
generally considered in dangerously short supply. Pity, then, the
casting directors of "Carnival!," which places at its center the
character of 16-year-old orphan Lili, an uber-ingenue of the highest
order. There are few girls on the planet (not even on musical theater's
raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens planet) whose eyes are as wide
as Lili's. And the Bob Merrill musical, despite a successful and
critically acclaimed run in the early '60s, has never been revived on
Broadway.