E-Mail This Article to a Friend Broadway contenders (continued)

The "change" of the title takes two forms. "Change comes fast and change comes slow" is a lyric motif, but it’s the dawn of civil rights, and change will come, at least for single mom Caroline’s four children — though she, like Troy Maxon of August Wilson’s Fences, fiercely disbelieves it. Her weapons are piety, rectitude, and swallowing pride like so much bile. The other "change" is the kind that jingles. Caroline’s fellow grieving soul is eight-year-old Noah Gellman, the Kushner stand-in, whose mother has recently died, leaving him and his remote clarinettist father bereft — though the latter has plugged the hole by marrying his wife’s best friend, whom Noah rejects, clinging instead to the "implacable, indestructible" Caroline. Stepmother Rose, annoyed that Noah routinely leaves change in his pockets, instructs Caroline to play finders-keepers. After first rejecting the notion, the underpaid domestic starts taking home the dimes and quarters so that her kids can have candy and comic books, too. When Hanukkah money makes an appearance and the ante is drastically upped, there’s a confrontation between maid and boy — reminiscent of Athol Fugard’s "Master Harold" . . . and the boys — that ruptures the relationship, which, never effusive, was rooted in shared sorrow and the occasional shared cigarette.

Caroline, or Change is nearly through-sung by a strong-voiced, pitch-perfect cast led by the formidable Tonya Pinkins — who along with the musical, book, score, director George C. Wolfe, and featured actress Anika Noni Rose (excellent as Caroline’s cocky teenage daughter) is nominated for a Tony. Although the idea for the piece originated with Kushner, Tesori’s contribution, which mixes R&B, Motown, gospel, klezmer, and a clever yet heartfelt storytelling reminiscent of William Finn’s Falsettos, is equally outstanding. I liked the composer’s Violet, but the music for Caroline, which includes lush melodies for a turbaned moon riding low in the night sky, is the show’s driving force, rescuing it from polemic. The second-act aria, a sort of operatic "Rose’s Turn" absolutely ripped from Pinkins, is the most thrilling thing I’ve heard in a theater in a while. In it Caroline, angrily and repeatedly invoking the slam of an iron, importunes God to murder her soul, turn her into "a pillar of salt," strangle the pride she literally can’t afford if her kids are to eat. Any audience member not a pillar of salt will be weeping.

Yet Pinkins, a true tragic actress whose Caroline is rooted in the harsh and the ordinary, does not wring sympathy. Limpingly negotiating the basement or sitting bone-tired to smoke on her own back stoop, her Caroline runs a gamut from resigned to terse to unpleasant ("Miss Crabby Appleton," Rose calls her in an amusing number that alternates between the liberal employer’s lame attempt to befriend the maid and her inner frustration that Caroline couldn’t care less). And her singing is as controlled as it is hair-raising. This powerful, uncompromising performer already has a Tony (for Jelly’s Last Jam); I’d like to see bookends.

Caroline has its ardency built into it. British playwright Tom Stoppard’s dizzying if not entirely sense-making 1972 farce amalgam of moral philosophy, murder mystery, marital misery, moon imagery, and gymnastics both linguistic and literal has often been characterized as erudite and theatrical but brittle. Then along comes the unprepossessing but incomparable Simon Russell Beale to give it — rather in the manner asked of the Wizard of Oz — a soul. The slightly doughy, 43-year-old English actor who has defied type as Hamlet and won enough Olivier and London Evening Standard Awards to stock a clunky charm bracelet plays George Moore, a smug if sincere professor of moral philosophy trying, in the words of director David Leveaux to Playbill, "to prove — on entirely intuitive grounds — the existence of God while wearing a cardigan."

While the jumper-clad George is holed up in his study tongue-twistingly working on a lecture entitled "Man: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?", his luscious if unstable young wife, Dottie, tries to stash in her closet the corpse of an acrobat academician shot in the first scene. A one-time musical-theater chanteuse, Dottie has been brought to breakdown by the effect of the recent moon landing on that orb’s romantic image in popular song and has taken to entertaining George’s slick colleague, master-of-all-trades-doctorial Archie Jumpers, in bed. It is Archie, abetted by a syncopated troupe of acrobats wielding a plastic body bag, who finally gets rid of the stiff. We never do find out "whodunit" as Stoppard’s intellectual vaudeville careers from Wittgenstein to Joe Orton, but we don’t get a definitive answer to George’s "Is God?" either. (Posing the question, Russell Beale’s soulful professor, after a long pause, instructs the secretary taking dictation to "leave a space.")

The Tony-nominated NT revival is practically danced, with an excellent combo elevated on a sort of inner stage at the rear to provide accompaniment. And Vicki Mortimer’s revolving set pulls off its terpsichorean task to the visual equivalent of the music of the spheres, George’s cluttered study and Dottie’s plush boudoir backed by a receding series of moons, planets, and constellations moving with the aid of a disco ball. Meanwhile, Dottie mourns the moon landing to tunes ranging from "Fly Me to the Moon" to a variation on "Sentimental Journey" in which she croons this response to George’s labyrinthine if muddled effort to pinpoint the Deity: "Heaven, how can I believe in Heaven? Just a lying rhyme for seven!" Add to the roundelay a star-struck detective named Bones, who enters looking like Columbo but ends up with one sartorial foot in Carmen Miranda and the other in the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Stoppard provides enough razzle-dazzle to make Chicago look like The People’s Court.

Providing the beating heart of the revival, though, are two sublime performers, both (along with director Leveaux) up for Tonys: Russell Beale, of course, for his ditheringly esoteric, egotistical, yet tender George and fetching Aussie Essie Davis for her unselfconsciously sexy if existentially lost Dottie (a role originated by Diana Rigg). As the unlikely couple of the play, the two actually convey relationship, faded yet affectionate, something that seldom comes across in Jumpers.

Russell Beale — spewing Stoppard’s convoluted constructs with the lightning precision of an auctioneer, his hands balled up in stretched-sweater pockets in ways that range from cuddly thoughtful to borderline masturbatory, his blue eyes as intensely perplexed as his reasoning, is a George in whom scholarly preoccupation does not nose out vulnerability and concern, whether for the wife he can no longer comfort or the pet tortoise he carries around like a palm pilot. Yet the character is at the same time a pedant-clown chasing a metaphysical tail, poking his glasses into his ears and giggling at his own jokes with all the self-satisfaction of Malvolio (whom the actor has memorably played).

Davis is hardly a match for Russell Beale (who is?), but her forlorn Dottie exudes girlishness and poise in equal measure, as well as a palpable if disdainful love for George that mixes nostalgia with desperation. (The two communicate best by playing Charades.) She sings with husky sweetness, dangles a champagne glass with such slinky casualness that the flute seems glued to her hand, and plays an entire scene with Russell Beale clad only in a short, baggy sweater that barely covers her naked pubis. Come to think of it, she handles her exquisite body with almost the same casual bravura that Stoppard does his exquisite mind.