Carnival!

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Carnival! was a 1961 Tony-award winning Broadway musical with book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics by Bob Merrill, starring Anna Maria Alberghetti, James Mitchell, Kaye Ballard, Pierre Olaf, and Jerry Orbach (making his Broadway debut). Gower Champion both directed and choreographed. The musical was based on the film Lili (1953).

Carnival! premiered on April 12, 1961 at the Imperial Theatre, where it played until December 15, 1962, when it moved to the Winter Garden Theatre. The musical closed on January 5, 1963 after 719 performances. A production was briefly mounted in London's West End in 1963; it featured Shirley Sands, Sally Logan, and one actor from the original Broadway production, James Mitchell. The show proved unpopular and quickly closed after 34 performances, although not without a cast album. Arthur Freed briefly contemplated a film version, probably with Mitchell and Pierre Olaf, but his plans abruptly collapsed [1].

Although Carnival! has never received a full Broadway revival, it has been revived twice off-Broadway by the Equity Library Theatre (1977) and the York Theatre Company (1993). In 2002, New York City Center Encores! mounted a concert production with Anne Hathaway as Lili and puppets by the Jim Henson Company, NY Muppet Workshop. (Both the Equity Library Theatre and Encores! stagings were taped for the New York Public Library Billy Rose Theatre Collection archives.) The New York Times review praised the Encores! concert, describing Hathaway as convincing in the role even though "Lili may be the most unworldly heroine ever in a Broadway musical, dangerously blurring the lines between innocence and mental deficiency" [2]. It has been in revival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC from February 17 to March 11, 2007.

1 1962 Tony Awards®
- 1.1 Winners
- 1.2 Nominations
2 References
3 Further reading
4 External links

[edit] 1962 Tony Awards®

[edit] Winners

Best Actress in a Musical - Anna Maria Alberghetti (tie with Diahann Carroll in No Strings)
Best Scenic Design - Will Steven Armstrong

[edit] Nominations

Best Musical. Producer - David Merrick.
Best Author of a Musical. Based on material by - Helen Deutsch
Best Featured Actor in a Musical - Pierre Olaf
Best Direction of a Musical - Gower Champion
Best Producer of a Musical - David Merrick

[edit] References

[1] Hugh Fordin, MGM's Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 518. ISBN 0-306-80730-0
[2] Ben Brantley (2002), A Girl Innocent Enough to Believe a Puppet Is Alive, The New York Times, February 9, 2002, Arts and Culture p. 7

[edit] Further reading

Gilvey, John Anthony. Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious American Musical. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. ISBN 0-312-33776-0
Payne-Carter, David, Brooks McNamara, and Steve Nelson, eds. Gower Champion: Dance and American Musical Theatre. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. ISBN 0-313-30451-3