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Tony Kushner: "Me? I am the wicked son"

Tony Kushner's musical Caroline or Change is on at London's Hampstead Theatre. John Nathan interviewed him back in 2006 when the National Theatre put on a production.

October 19, 2006 23:00
Angela Caesar as The Moon in Caroline, or Change at the Hampstead Theatre, 2018

ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan

6 min read

 

 Caroline, or Change,is a musical set in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where, according to the show’s lyrics and its author Tony Kushner, “nothing ever happens.”

Kushner should know. He was raised there, though born in New York. Yet, out of the humdrum Lake Charles of his childhood, Kushner has written the book and libretto to a musical set in 1963 (to Jeanine Tesori’s music) that takes in America’s greatest political struggle, that of civil rights for its African-American population.

Central to the show is the relationship between a black maid called Caroline and Noah, the Jewish son of her white employers. It is Kushner’s most autobiographical work. Eight-year-old Noah is an amalgam of the author and his younger brother Eric. The Caroline of the title is modelled on their family’s black maid Maudi Lee Davis, to whom the musical is dedicated. It is a startlingly imaginative piece in which household appliances, such as a washing machine, are given their own numbers to sing, while Caroline (played by Tonya Pinkins, who created the role in New York) is imagined by Noah as the President of the United States.