These notes were written for a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel which I directed at the Merriam Theater at The University of the Arts in March of 2001.

On the e-mail list which the faculty and students in the Musical Theater Program use to communicate with one another, there's been much discussion lately about the actor and the audience, focusing on whether it's a good thing that an actor can move an audience to tears, or that an audience might expect an actor to do such a thing.

The students are rightly suspicious of works that are emotionally manipulative. They're young adults of the 21st Century, and they've found ironic suspiciousness a useful device for shielding their tender souls from the heart-wrenching images that bombard them from the news, movies and other modern media.

Their behavior is hardly unfamiliar to me. I came of the age in the 1970's, nicely insulated in irony and much enamored of a brutal coldness in the artistic works I favored. I found Zappa's ironic sneer, Sondheim's chilly elegance and bitter truths of Bertolt Brecht much more to my liking than, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein.

But the years changed me. I shed hot tears at the birth of my son and the death of my father, and learned a little more each day about how to savor the fragile sweetness of the world and the friends and family who were my precious companions in it. I discovered the warmth that lurked beneath the glittering surface of Sondheim's musicals. And as my classroom duties required me to become familiar with them, I grew to appreciate the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, particularly Carousel, the musical whose highly-touted revival in the early 90's reawakened audiences and critics to its surprisingly complex personality.

The things I read about that production, and the things I thought when I eventually saw it, reminded me of how a director's job is to search for the element of truth at the heart of any theatrical experience. Finding the truthful heart of Carousel is a tricky business, with its songs of real nice clambakes and little girls as white as peaches and cream, its star-polishing Yankee deity and its jig-stepping sailor boys. Balancing seriousness and frivolousness, sentimentality and entertainment in this musical requires faith in the authors' skill and the audience's ability to accept it in all its rich diversity.

At its heart, Carousel is the story of an impetuous man and the ways his foolish acts hurts the woman he loves. It is also the story of a community and the ways it finds to celebrate life's little miracles - the return of spring, the abundance of the sea, a high school graduation - as it enfolds the hapless young woman in the embrace of their loving support. Joy and anguish, hurt and healing, these are the cycles of life that Carousel depicts, in a bittersweet tale which is by turns charming and startling, utterly unpredictable in its dramatic structure yet possessing a quiet, weathered dignity as solemn as a lighthouse.

I think that the scores of students who have worked on this production of Carousel have been enriched by the time they've spent working on a show that has been described as the "best musical of the century." And if some of them have found themselves wiping away a furtive tear during the course of their experiences, I hope they recognized it as an important step in their emotional education.