“Carousel” is a problematic musical. Not for its score, which is gorgeous, but because it’s a romance with bruises — a love story between a spirited young woman and the bullying, short-fuse thug she marries. He hits her. She stays. Not exactly a lighthearted evening.
But Rodgers and Hammerstein borrowed that trouble from the play they based their show on, Ferenc Molnar’s “Liliom,” whose last line, spoken by a mother to her teenage daughter, is astonishingly dark — the cycle of dysfunction crystallized.
“It is possible, dear,” the mother says, “that someone may beat you and beat you and beat you — and not hurt you at all.”
Just as it’s intriguing to watch how directors confront the challenges of “Carousel” (a Broadway revival opens this spring), it’s interesting to see other playwrights wrestle with adapting “Liliom.” Michael Weller’s new play “Jericho,” presented by the Attic Theater Company at the Wild Project, is a case in point, and he acquits himself nicely. The last scene, in fact, is so movingly done that it tempers the impression of this frustratingly uneven world-premiere production, directed by Laura Braza.
In a wink to “Carousel,” which mentions Coney Island, Weller has set his version of the tale there during the Great Depression, and Julia Noulin-Mérat papers the walls of her set with cheery period posters. Skilled at carnival barking if nothing else, Jericho (Vasile Flutur) meets Julie (Hannah Sloat) when she rides on his merry-go-round. He’s used to girls swooning for him; apparently they find his rough edges charming.
He’s less accustomed to the stubbornly determined love that Julie, a kitchen worker at a women’s hostel, offers from the outset. On their first evening together — after his employer, Mrs. Mosca (a solid Stephanie Pope, too briefly seen), gives him the boot — Julie elects to stay out past curfew and lose her job, too. It’s a bold move at a time when people are standing in bread lines.
Weller, who landed in controversy last fall when Brandeis University canceled a staging of “Buyer Beware,” his play about Lenny Bruce, adds a vaguely ghoulish, shape-shifting narrator (Jerzy Gwiazdowski) to the proceedings, which is also a bold move. Unlike Julie’s, it pays off.
But Braza never gets her arms around one of the trickiest things about “Liliom” and its variations — a tone that shades from violence to euphoria, menace to humor. The audience response is sometimes unintended laughter.
It is a curiously cast production, too. Sloat makes an appealing Julie, but the talented Flutur doesn’t have the brawn that Jericho requires, and there is no lurking threat in his performance. Braza has also enlisted a much too youthful actress, Erinn Holmes, to play an old woman — small role, big distraction.
Jamal James is compelling, though, in his handful of parts. And the company’s secret ace is the protean Jack Sochet, whose several roles include Jericho’s pal, Tynk, an amusing criminal who isn’t above murder. Toggling between comedy and cruelty, Sochet displays an easy agility that this production could use a lot more of.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.