Not Just Pocket Change

Is it possible for a musical to be really about something — to grapple with serious issues of race and class, childhood loss and adult guilt — and not feel like homework? That's the question raised by Caroline, or Change, the most ambitious new musical of New York City's rather dull theater season. Written by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and partly based on his own childhood, the show is set in Louisiana in 1963 and focuses on the relationship between a black maid and the liberal Jewish family that employs her. At a time when musicals seem to be groping for ways to move beyond campy Broadway fluff without boring an audience to tears, Caroline is a breakthrough. It's a musical in an operatic style — Jeanine Tesori's score is almost entirely sung through — but with a story so grounded in the ordinary details of life in a specific place and time that it almost seems to have discovered a new genre. And it nearly works.

The off-Broadway show — in a lovely vest-pocket production by George C. Wolfe — begins in a basement laundry room where Caroline (Tonya Pinkins) is trudging between the washing machine and the dryer to the accompaniment of a transistor radio. The blend of naturalism and lyricism is established right away: all the appliances are embodied by human beings (a Supremes-style trio, for example, provides the voice of the radio). The anthropomorphic devices don't stop there. The moon appears with an evening gown — bedecked soprano inside. The news of President Kennedy's assassination is announced by a blues-singing city bus.

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Noah (Harrison Chad), an 8-year-old boy whose mother has died and who resents his new stepmother, idolizes Caroline but is frustrated by her coldness. His stepmother Rose (Veanne Cox), a New York transplant, tries reaching out to the maid but settles instead for enlisting her help in disciplining Noah. Annoyed that he continually leaves change in his pants pockets, Rose tells Caroline to keep anything she finds. It will teach him a lesson; she could use the money.

The well-meaning gesture frays the delicate web of racial, economic and family relations. Caroline wrestles with whether to take the money; Noah goads her with ever larger amounts. Meanwhile, we glimpse Caroline's home life (she's a single mother with four kids) and Noah's extended family, including Rose's radical-leftist father. Tesori's eclectic score, which mixes blues, gospel and '60s pop with classical and art-song filigree, can rouse, amuse or establish a mood with equal ease, ennobling lines that could sound clunky if spoken: "Gonna pass me a law," sings Caroline, "no woman can be my age and not know how to read a map."

Yet Caroline — like Caroline — doesn't move us as she should. The anecdote that sets the story in motion seems too thin to carry the message-laden freight. The broader social milieu — the early civil-rights movement, the J.F.K. assassination — is merely introduced, not dramatized. The musical aims for operatic tragedy and — with the help of Pinkins' steely, square-shouldered power — keeps promising a big payday. But too often, we can't help feeling a little shortchanged.