Period piece

Opera North’s latest and most ambitious outreach project is a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which will end its tour with a month’s run from mid-August at the Barbican. The second performance in the Grand Theatre Leeds went down very well, and I’m sure that the whole run will be a great success.  My own fairly negative reaction seemed so discrepant that I have been watching and listening to various versions since, but with no more favourable reaction. The Opera North programme book, lavish but unhelpful, put my back up by quoting more than once an American critic’s assertion that ‘if it weren’t so enjoyable, one might be tempted to call it opera’. This is explicated in a note by the usually brilliant Ethan Mordden as ‘Carousel is like art, only better’, a defiantly meaningless remark. I don’t think Opera North is doing anyone a service, least of all itself, by distancing itself from its own identity.