A Welcome Revival for ‘Carnival,’ the Most Moving Musical Coming-of-Age Story Ever Staged

If you really want to rip someone’s heart out, there’s no surer way to achieve that than with a slow waltz in minor. In musical theater, ¾ time is usually a signifier of something old-fashioned, something past, something bygone. Minor keys convey sadness, or at least a sense of melancholy. To put a childlike melody in b minor, and then have it sung by a tween girl in harmony with a chorus of hand puppets is really stacking the deck. “The Man Who Hated People,” a 1950 short story by the screenwriter and novelist Paul Gallico, inspired two of the most beloved minor key waltzes in the songbook: “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo,” by Helen Deutsch and Bronisław Kaper, which is the major song in “Lili,” the classic 1953 MGM movie adaptation of Gallico’s story, and “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round” by Bob Merrill, from “Carnival,” the no-less-classic 1961 Broadway adaptation of that film.“Love Makes the World Go ‘Round” is the song you walk out humming from “Carnival” which is being staged in a trim, compact production directed by Robert W. Schneider. Clearly, the show`s creators, librettist Michael Stewart and composer-lyricist Merrill deliberately placed it at the end of Act 1 apparently because they realized the audience needs an intermission to recover — and to run and get more Kleenex — after being hit with such a big emotional wallop by this devastating lullaby.In either incarnation, “Lili” or “Carnival,” this is just about the most moving coming-of-age story ever set to music. In a new production of “Carnival” at the AMT Theater staged by the J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company, Bridget Delaney is Lili, in the footsteps of Leslie Caron in 1953, Anna Maria Alberghetti in 1961, and Anne Hathaway in the excellent 2002 Encores production; a young girl finding her way through life by interacting with a troupe of puppets. Anne Hathaway as Lili in the Encores production of ‘Carnival’ in 2002. Gerry GoodsteinBut the Broadway version is called “Carnival” for a reason: as originally produced by David Merrick and directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, “Carnival” satisfied the need for spectacle that also powered such circus-centric Broadway shows as the 1935 “Jumbo” and more recently the 2024 “Water For Elephants.” Even though setting of “Carnival” is understood to be a small-time European circus, the big numbers in the original production and in the Encores version were fairly larger-than-life; a huge chorus of juggles, acrobats, barkers, vendors, and other midway denizens.You don’t get that in this production at a small scale venue but there is a major compensating virtue, and that is the puppets themselves: a red-headed scaliwag of a boy, a self-deprecating walrus, a sly but nonetheless lovable fox, and a self-aggrandizing diva. The intimate space allows the audience to truly connect with these wooden actors, who in every production of the work, have to be at least as relatable and believable as the flesh-and-blood cast. Even if you’re not familiar with the story, you’re breathlessly waiting for the inevitable moment at the end of Act 1 when Lili connects with the foursome and hits us right in the kishkas with that eagerly-anticipated minor key waltz, which is foreshadowed in the opening when a lone musician walks on stage playing the theme on a solo concertina. Then, at the start of Act 2 with a nearly ecstatic sequence of three adorable numbers in a row —”Yum Ticky,” “The Rich,” and “Beautiful Candy”—featuring Lili and her little friends. Or not so little — the puppets are oversized, and Ms. Delaney is barely five feet tall.The rest of the production has its strengths and weaknesses, but it’s worth it to see those puppets in action, voices supplied by the two actors playing the puppeteers, Paul (Mason Hensley) and Jacquot (Collin O’Neill), but otherwise performed by the actual puppeteers, Richard Gomez and Clint Hromsco. As the leading man, Mr. Hensley has his work cut out for him in a role defined by two of the greatest-ever Broadway baritones, Jerry Orbach in 1961 and Brian Stokes Mitchell (2002). The cast of ‘Carnival.’ J2 SpotlightThe tear ducts start to well from the moment Ms. Delaney makes her entrance as Lili, with her tiny suitcase and oversized hat. Her role is a difficult one; she has to be naive but not, as we would say in 21st century parlance, spectrum-y. Lili is supposed to be 16, which is uncomfortable enough when various considerably older men, including a vendor and Marco the Magnificent, a matinee idol of a magician and lothario, cast a lecherous eye upon her. In this production, we have a younger-than-usual-looking Lili (you would swear she was 13) and a slightly older Marco (Gregory White) which makes it close to creepy, and it doesn’t help that she pursues him more than the other way around.Dena Winkle is a delight as Rosalie, which was transformed from a glamorous role in 1953 (Zsa Zsa Gabor) to a comic one in 1961 (Kaye Ballard), before the two were merged into one by Debbie Shapiro in 2002. That’s Ms. Winkle’s path as well, as she delivers the show’s great comic tour-de-force number, “Humming,” in which Rosalie muses over Marco’s vast catalog of infidelities. While “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” was easily the best-remembered song from “Lili,” the one number from “Carnival” to become, in Ethan Mordden’s phrase, “cabaret caviar,” is not “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round” but rather “Mira.” This is not so much Lili’s “I want” song as her “I am” song, and a lot of us were first exposed to it in very different renditions by supper doyen Mabel Mercer and jazz trombone legend J. J. Johnson.Additionally tonight the J2 Spotlight company is also putting on a songbook show, dedicated to “Carnival”‘s composer, “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round: The Music of Bob Merrill.”“Carnival” is filled with comedy and spectacle, and these varying modes serve to enhance, rather than detract from the sentiment. All of which illustrates that Michael Stewart and Bob Merrill knew well the universal truth that it takes more than love to make the world go round.

A Welcome Revival for ‘Carnival,’ the Most Moving Musical Coming-of-Age Story Ever Staged

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