The revival of Carousel is an instance of a phenomenon that seems to date from the 1980s—the English redaction, rethinking, reshuffling of American cultural artifacts from a couple of generations back. On the musical side, there was a Porgy and Bess at Glyndebourne, a Guys and Dolls at the Royal National Theatre (not the production now in New York), and a Carmen Jones at the Old Vic; there is a Pal Joey now in the works in London. On the dramatic side, attempts have regularly been made to resuscitate minor Williams like Orpheus Descending. The tack generally is to claim to be deglamorizing and deprettifying a work whose revelation of the horrors of American life has been obscured by the passage of time and, more sinisterly, by the forces of conformity.

Something of this sort clearly inspired Nicholas Hytner, the youngish director of Miss Saigon, to take a look at Carousel, the 1945 musical with which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein followed up their first collaboration, Oklahoma! (1943). Carousel goes back, via an American stage adaptation first put on in the 1920s, to Liliom(1909), a Ferenc Molnár play about a ne’er-do-well given an extra day after death to repair some of the mischief done in his lifetime, especially to his long-suffering wife. The popular stage fantasy had been filmed more than once, most recently in 1934 by Fritz Lang, with Charles Boyer as Liliom and, way down in the credits, Antonin Artaud as the