Nova Y. Payton and Korinn Walfall. Photo by Grace Toulotte.
Caroline, or Change is a play that saves much of its hope and optimism for the next generation. And Korinn Walfall, the fiery representative of that future, is worth the investment.
As Emmie Thibodeaux, the title character’s take-no-prisoners daughter, Walfall shines as a gifted vocalist with a commanding stage presence. She’s a standout in a cast stocked with vocal superstars, including a radio chorus staffed by local favorites Felicia Curry and Kara-Tameika Watkins, as well as D.C. musical theater veteran Will Gartshore in an understated turn as the withdrawn father figure Stuart Gellman.
Fresh off a run of Tony Kushner’s most famous work, Angels in America, Round House returns to the Pulitzer Prize-winner with a show that was not universally praised when it first opened in 2006. But time has been kind to the work, which draws on musical influences ranging from gospel to blues to the celebratory Jewish music, klezmer. Its composer, Jeanine Tesori, went on to write Fun Home (and more randomly, the musical in the recent Gilmore Girls’ revival).
As its title alludes, Caroline, or Change features characters in a typical Kushner mode, struggling with change but needing to embrace it. It doesn’t come easily to characters like Caroline, a 39-year-old maid haunted by bitterness and regret who can do little more than make ends meet for her family of children. She works for the Gellmans, a Jewish family whose father and son have been unable to move past the death of their matriarch, even as an awkward but well-meaning new wife Rose (Dorea Schmidt) clumsily struggles to make a new home for them.
Change can happen in frustratingly small steps. Caroline, or Change is set in New Orleans in a racially charged 1963, where we see the contrasting reactions of a middle-class Jewish family and struggling black family to world events like the assassination of JFK and the Civil Rights movement. But while characters grow in baby steps, the show is more grandiose in spectacle. Round House’s production spares no expense, with an impressive rotating set that alternates between the lonely house’s many upstairs levels, and Caroline’s basement domain. A beefed-up orchestra helps brings the musical’s dazzling vocal numbers to life.
Despite Walfall’s promising young turn, this show is, of course, a vehicle for the gifted, crystalline-voiced Nova Y. Payton as Caroline, who doesn’t disappoint. Her self-reflecting second act soliloquy song, the biblically-influenced “Lot’s Wife,” brings down the house. The audience may not be assured that life will ever be kind to Caroline, but none can deny her steely strength and ability to bear it.
Caroline or Change runs through Feb. 26 at Round House Theatre. Tickets ($38.50-$90) are available here.
