Performing Arts

IRVING – Carousel is coming here direct from Broadway – after a layover of 60 years.

Ricky Moon / Special to DMN

Both Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II loved their second collaboration more than any of their other musicals. The initial New York production had an orchestra with an unprecedented 40 players. The lush orchestration was so impractical that it soon got packed away and was altered for future productions.

Lyric Stage's new Carousel, which opens tonight, is the first fully staged production to use that original orchestration since the premiere Broadway run closed in the 1940s.

"For us, it's a thrill to be able to work at this level. We've never been able to do this – 40 pieces in the pit and 40 performers onstage," Lyric founding producer Steven Jones says. "Carousel was unique in calling for an orchestra of this size. It's thrilling to watch Jay Dias work with it." Mr. Dias is the conductor.

The Irving production bucks a national trend. Audiences generally hear ever-smaller ensembles backing the singers in musical theater these days. All sorts of tricks are used to avoid hiring expensive union orchestra players: substituting synthesized strings, reducing the score to a piano duo, even using the actors to play all the instruments, as in the famous recent Broadway revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company .

"The problem is not only budgetary, it's about space as well," Mr. Jones says. "Not that many theaters now have a pit that will accommodate a 40-piece orchestra."

When you hear a full orchestra playing a musical these days, it's virtually always a concert performance, often the bare-bones equivalent of a play's staged reading rather than a full production with sets. Lyric Stage followed that trend with its Sweeney Todd at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center last season, as did Casa Mañana and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra with their Show Boat earlier this year.

In the summer of 2006, Mr. Jones and the New York-based Mr. Dias were throwing around pie-in-the sky ideas for Lyric Stage's 2007-08 season. Carousel (in this massive original version) was at the top of the wish list. At first, the ever-practical Mr. Jones thought, "No way!" But the company proposed the project to the National Endowment for the Arts, and the NEA came through with its first grant to Lyric. All $30,000 (and more) will go to pay the instrumentalists for the two-week run of the show.

Mr. Dias had gotten to know Bruce Pomahac, director of music for the lordly Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, so he was familiar with the restoration job that Mr. Pomahac had done on Carousel beginning in 2001.

Mr. Pomahac is full of delightful details about what made putting the original Carousel back together again such a challenge. Composer Rodgers wanted that 40-piece orchestra because of the romantic nature of Ferenc Molnar's story about a young factory worker who falls in love with a wild barker for a carousel. Greats like Puccini and Gershwin had wanted the rights to the original play, Liliom, but it was Mr. Rodgers who got them.

His previous show, Oklahoma!, was a huge hit, so Mr. Rodgers was in a position to get what he wanted: 40, rather than the usual 25, instrumentalists.

"One reason Rodgers wanted so many instruments was that he wanted the score to sound like Puccini, so he added a lot of brass at the bottom," Mr. Pomahac says. "He used it sparingly. Nobody could sing over it anyway. The singers didn't use microphones in those days. But Rodgers also wanted the big orchestra for the quieter music."

As Mr. Pomahac points out, symphonic music sounds rich because the large number of instruments allows for many smaller combinations to create color. Somebody asked Mr. Rodgers why he needed 16 violins (actually 13 violins and three violas, but to the questioner they looked the same). "Because 16 can play softer than four," was Mr. Rodgers' surprising response.

Rodgers and Hammerstein cannily kept not only the legal rights to their shows, but also the physical archives that accrued during their creation. The first few, which had been produced by other entities, they actually bought back at great expense.

The original orchestral parts to Carousel had been packed away in a trunk until Mr. Pomahac exhumed them in 2001. But they had been scrawled on and were otherwise difficult to decipher. The original production took place long before there were copy machines, so a unique sheet of music might be changed many times and marked up with conductors' instructions. Lots of detective work went into decoding them.

"You know, in rehearsal, it's chaos," Mr. Pomahac says. "A copyist had to make sense out of the jumble he was given, so a lot of mistakes were made."

Houston Grand Opera conductor John DeMain had told the R&H organization that there was "something wrong" with the Carousel orchestrations that he couldn't put his finger on. It turned out that one of the problems was that, in the famous "Carousel Waltz" and the song that followed, some musicians were playing a revised orchestration while others were playing the original. So even the Broadway version wasn't as "correct" as the one Lyric Stage will present.

The reconstruction was even more complicated because Carousel has so much dance music and underscoring (instrumental backing to the spoken dialogue).

Mr. Pomahac finished the Carousel reconstruction in 2003, and the new score was used in a concert performance at the Hollywood Bowl. But, he notes, it still really wasn't what the Broadway audience would have heard because it was played by the entire Los Angeles Philharmonic rather than a 40-piece orchestra.

In any case, he thinks what he accomplished is important to the history of American musical theater.

"Although Carousel was originally the least successful of the Big Five Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, it's the one that goes deepest," he says. "The emotional stakes are higher."

The orchestra is one of the keys to that Carousel score, and thus to the stature of a work that many critics rank at the top of all the musicals ever written. Seeing such pieces done right is dear to Mr. Jones' heart.

"Hopefully, we'll be able to do a show on this scale, if not every year, at least every 18 months," Mr. Jones says.

Mr. Pomahac is finishing up a restoration of the score for The King and I. Mr. Jones has already written an application to the NEA so he can put the show on during Lyric Stage's 2008-09 season.

Through Sept. 16. Irving Arts Center's Carpenter Performance Hall, 3333 N. MacArthur Blvd., Irving. $20 to $45. 972-252- 2787; www.lyricstage.org.