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Event
Carousel
Previously planning on never including a musical or a classic in their repertoire The Living Room was approached by the very talented Kyle Hatley and couldn't resist the challenge. The only rule for classics, or musicals, and especially classic musicals was that they be very deconstructed, and that's exactly the exciting angle Kyle had in mind. Carousel like you've never seen it.
About The Production:
In a coastal village originally set toward the end of the 19th century, the swaggering, carefree carnival barker, Billy Bigelow, captivates and marries a millworker, Julie Jordan. Billy loses his job just as he learns that Julie is pregnant and, desperately intent upon providing a decent life for his family, he is coerced into being an accomplice to a robbery. Caught in the act and facing the certainty of prison, he takes his own life and is sent 'up there.' Billy is allowed to return to earth for one day fifteen years later, and he encounters the daughter he never knew. She is a lonely, friendless teenager, her father's reputation as a thief and bully having haunted her throughout her young life. Billy's one-day return to life on Earth is an attempt to instill in both the child and her mother a sense of hope and dignity he failed to provide them with while he was alive. Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's Liliom skewers the darkness of the original source material with violent cuts of light, composing a dramatic testimony to the power and danger of love.
The Living Room production of Carousel under the direction of Kyle Hatley aspires to break the icon of this American Musical classic by bringing to the surface the reality of these conflicted characters and their endurance and confrontation of its often-overlooked themes of impossible love and incomparable pain and the choices we make in the name of both.
There will be a "nakedness" about the production's design, direction and performance in order to exact the core of its story. The production will feature virtually no set and there will appear to be no costume design. There will be one piano. There will be dozens of closet-style strung-up light bulbs dangling conspiratorially from the ceiling that will click on and off to establish mood, scene changes, life and death, punctuating and narrating the telling of the story. There will be a profile playing space running the length of The Living Room's upstairs. There will be a kind of Tennessee Williams feel about the story's atmosphere something about the text and the sound of the music that owns something we have all come to know: sex and violence, and the beautifully dark complexity of their natural harmony. There will be a kind of sweatiness about the performers. There will be actors who can sing and singers who can act. There will be, simply and without apology, a muscular strength to the telling of this story, and it will be as visceral and mean and lovely as the text upon which it is based. In breaking the icon of Rodgers & Hammerstein's legendary classic, this production hopes to reveal its guts, its life-blood, its human complexity and simplicity to a contemporary audience.
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LocationThe Living Room
1818 McGee
Kansas City, MO 64108
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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