CAROUSEL
CAROUSEL
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the S.F. Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.
William Butler Yeats once said, "Players and painted stage took all my love, and not those things that they were emblems of."
If one wanted to renew one's faith in the emerging generation, then one should get thee to Encinal High School for their current production of Rodgers and Hammersteins's CAROUSEL.
All the elements of an outstanding musical are clearly evidenced in this ambitious production: great singing, strenuous choreography and quality acting.
To his credit as a teacher and a director, Robert Moorhead never underestimates the talent, the ambition nor the willingness of Encinal students to flirt with the seemingly impossible, to take-on the difficult and to make an extravaganza look easy and fun.
Stage stalwart Ian Merrifield superbly plays the romantic, nefarious and yet ironically heroic Billy Bigelow.
To his credit Ian successfully tackles what is arguably the show's most arduous song: "Soliloquy" in which Billy imagines his future child first as a boy; then as a girl.
Ian essentially plays two parts: Billy the sensitive tender and caring romantic and then abruptly morphs into Billy the tough guy who abuses his wife and weilds a knife to rob a man.
Billy is man as troubled by his past as he is hopeful of his future and Ian makes these transititions as smoothly and credibly as a veteran actor.
As Oliver Goldsmith once said of a good actor such as Ian: "On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting: twas only that when he was off stage he was acting."
This year Ian departs the Encinal stage for Cambridge and the Odeon of Harvard.
Jazz Aguon performs a wonderful Carrie Pipperidge: vacillating between a beautiful working class girl who wants to laugh, sing, dance and enjoy life and a restrained young lady who must be prim and proper enough to win the middle class hand the stogy and Puritanical Enoch Snow (wonderfully played by Matthew Strasser).
Samantha Chopus as Julie Jordan more than measures up to her leading man Ian.
Miss Chopus sings with a degree of practiced pecision, range and daring boldness that is worthy the show's most romantically memorable song: "IF I LOVED YOU."
And speaking of great voices, the mellifluous Kendra Dodd is the most conspicuously beautiful voice to have ever emanated from the stage and to have echoed through the rafters of Encinal High.
Fortunately Miss Dodd is limited to two songs: one more song and she would have stole the show.
Miss Dodd is proof that there is no disguising natural tallent and there is no dismissing what can be attainmed in four years of professional voice training.
The ebulient Miss Dodd, as if on wings, glides through the cast like Julie Andrews glides through the Austrian Alps, seemingly effortlessly, performing the most famous songs of the show: JUNE IS BUSTIN' OUT ALL OVER and YOU'LL NEVER WALK ALONE.
When you attend the performance—either on April 18th or April 19th—be sure to have Kendra autograph your program: she is not likely to remain an amateur much longer.
In this musical, even a dirty rotten "wharf rat" scoundrel has a certain magnet sociopathic charm and that charm is provided by the accomplished actor Cory Kahane who pleasingly plays the dastardly Jigger Craiggin.
As Gestalt would say, "The whole is more than the sum of the pieces" and this show is no acception.
Other noteworthy contributions to this most enjoyable show include Mahmoud Kohgodai as the Policeman, Lazlo Steele as the sagacious Starkeeper and the delightful Bersabel Tadesse as one of the Snow Children.
If you are an Alamedean, you owe to yourself to check out what high energy, fresh talent and creativity are doing at Encinal High.
The curtain goes up Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
.,
Ian
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