A Musical Guide to Caroline, or Change
Jeanine Tesori's brooding, complex score for Caroline, or Change is packed with recurring themes and motives. Unlike the traditional Broadway song structure, Tesori's music is interested in communicating a constant stream of precise emotional events. The score to Caroline is always building tension, achingly beautiful melodies surface and submerge, then return transformed, with new orchestrations and new associations to characters and feelings. Here is a quick guide to some of the play's common musical gestures.
- In the play's opening, listen for Caroline's line "there is only under water." The "under ground/under water" antithesis occurs in the lyrics throughout the play, and you'll notice that every time it comes up, there is a musical callback to this first moment.
- The score uses rhythms, structures, and melodies from a wide variety of musical sources, including early 60s Motown pop, Delta blues, Klezmer, slave spirituals, and even Broadway musicals (in the Radio's first number, a major-key modulation that wouldn't be out of place in a Broadway finale is abruptly cut off by Caroline repeating, "Nothing ever happens").
- A roiling, driving bass groove, introduced by the moaning Dryer in the play's first scene, comes back in the transcendent "Lot's Wife." In the opening, Caroline is lamenting "Thirty dollars ain't enough." The rhythm established here underscores moments of similar crisis throughout the show.
- Dottie, Caroline's neighbor, regales Caroline with some choice lyrics about her caustic attitude. A sly 3-note bass figure accompanies Dottie's initial attempts at pleasant conversation, and this chord structure returns in the low woodwinds when she begs Caroline to change herself, and acknowledges the pain that comes with change in a complimentary scene late in the play.
- The two major musical "worlds," that of the Gellmans' chamber music and Klezmer-inflected woodwinds and that of Caroline's bluesy, pop-song basement come together at the Hannukah party, where Mr. Stopnick's didactic recitative eventually gives way to Emmie's spirited rhythm and blues.
This is just a taste of the kind of richly associative and evocative musical language to be found in Caroline, or Change. Tesori's layered score is as concerned as Kushner's script with the theme of change, the tension of transformation, and the pleasure of emergence in a new form. As you watch the show, you'll hear countless other examples of melodies, themes, and rhythms that establish and then change, one character's iconic theme becoming the backdrop to an unrelated scene, and then splitting into rhythmic and harmonic components to inform other musical moments throughout, as well as references to popular tunes and traditional songs, again transformed into something new through orchestration, deft re-writing, or simply by being placed in this new context. In the end, it's impossible to say who's more responsible for telling the stories of Caroline, Noah, Rose, Emmie, and their families--Kushner or Tesori. The power of each is entirely beholden to, and invigorated by, the other.
–Jack Tamburri
