Caroline, or Change review

Caroline, or Change Review - Broadway musical

Musical reworked several times to be not so... cold, if we may call it like that. It had some difficulties, which it was able to overcome during the off-Broadway exhibition. For example, the complete alienation from the public, which it had previously, now had been replaced by inclusion, when the existence of the public wasn’t recalled just along the way. Once the actors got used to their roles more organic after all its previews in the Broadway’s scale, they ceased to be so alienated. Yes, we understand that the topics raised in this musical, are quite serious, but their giving to the hearts of the public through the prism of full attention on self-consciousness is not the best option.

George C. Wolfe gave to this musical the ability to convey to the audience the old themes in new ways, through small representative pieces. When the economic downturn and the confrontation between the races, which is still there in abundance, from a large scale all over the country, shrink to the size of a single family (in our context – two families) and displayed through an employer-employee relationship. Exploiter and exploited. Who is paid only $30 per week for the dirty work in difficult and even dangerous conditions. Who cannot even buy Christmas presents for her children or to take them to the dentist because she physically does not have enough money.

After the main character, Caroline, arguing with a boy of her employer, due to the particular application of the educational process of this little fellow, she generally becomes endangered in losing even that unpretentious work that she has. She reflects on her role as a small cog in a big machine of capitalism, cursing fate and frustratingly aware that her eternal destiny is to be at the laundry service for breadcrumbs. She will remain the one who cannot afford even good, tasty and hot Christmas meal for her family, not to mention for herself.

A musical about the confrontation of the two worlds & worldviews (everything happens on the background of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Vietnam War, segregation, abolition, young Martin Luther King and so on), and also large perturbations in the society. And all this only results in the fact that small people remain small because they have no opportunities to study, and there is only a tough day-by-day work, necessity to feed, which cannot be treated casually, because it provides them unsightly existence. We see this musical in this way: although slavery was abolished, it still has its real manifestations in the form of servile work everywhere.
Last Update:April, 06th 2016