Caroline, or Change: A New Musical

Disc 1
1	16 Feet Beneath the Sea 1:45
2	The Radio 0:44
3	Laundry Quintet 2:10
4	Noah Down the Stairs 1:06
5	The Cigarette 0:43
6	Laundry Finish 1:36
7	The Dryer 1:20
8	I Got Four Kids 4:09
9	Caroline, There's Extra Food 2:03
10	There Is No God, Noah 1:11
11	Rose Stopnick Can Cook 1:14
12	Long Distance 2:35
13	Dotty and Caroline 4:32
14	Moon Change 0:50
15	Moon Trio 1:45
16	The Bus 3:23
17	That Can't Be 0:41
18	Noah and Rose 0:53
19	Inside/Outside 1:29
20	JFK 1:59
21	Duets: No One Waitin' 2:55
22	Duets: 'Night Mamma 0:44
23	Duets: Gonna Pass Me a Law 2:14
24	Duets: Noah Go to Sleep 1:58
25	Noah Has a Problem 1:49
26	Stuart and Noah 3:23
27	Quarter in the Bleach Cup 1:43
28	Caroline Takes My Money Home 1:03
29	Roosevelt Petrucius Coleslaw 10:00
30	Special Features CD-ROM Track
Disc 2
1	Santa Comin' Caroline 1:15
2	Little Reward 0:57
3	1943 5:10
4	Mr. Gellman's Shirt 1:32
5	Ooh Child 0:32
6	Rose Recovers 1:57
7	I Saw Three Ships 1:34
8	The Chanukah Party 5:29
9	Dotty and Emmie 2:04
10	I Don't Want My Child to Hear That 1:05
11	Mr. Stopnick and Emmie 1:33
12	Kitchen Fight 1:23
13	A Twenty Dollar Bill and Why 2:22
14	I Hate the Bus 1:41
15	Moon, Emmie and Stuart Trio 3:11
16	The Twenty Dollar Bill 2:26
17	Caroline and Noah Fight 1:52
18	Aftermath 5:50
19	Sunday Morning 3:19
20	Lot's Wife 5:14
21	Salty Teardrops 2:33
22	Why Does Our House Have a Basement? 2:24
23	Underwater 2:22
24	Epilogue 3:19

Barnes & Noble

Caroline, or Change is a new musical drama set in Louisiana in 1963, during the civil rights movement and just before JFK’s assassination. This wrenching tale of an embittered 39-year-old black maid employed by a middle-class Jewish family, is concerned with big themes: poverty, racism, death, divorce, domestic violence, civil disobedience, and political militancy, among others. It’s also the most bracing dose of unadorned humanity to reach Broadway in years. Caroline’s highly pedigreed creators -- composer Jeanine Tesori (Thoroughly Modern Millie), lyricist and librettist Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and celebrated director George C. Wolfe –- do not shy away from the difficulties of their complex heroine but, rather, imbue her with real-life limitations, foibles, and prejudices. This superb two-disc recording invites listeners to relish every nuance of the terrific polyglot score and revel in Tonya Pinkins’s heartbreaking, Tony-nominated, performance as Caroline Thibodeaux, the housecleaner forced to suffer endless daily humiliations as she toils long hours in a steamy, airless basement. Profound, moving, and deeply unsettling, this stunning cast album is the perfect introduction to this very important new musical. David Cohen

All Music Guide

More of a pocket opera than a conventional musical, Caroline, or Change is the work of playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori. The plot, which concerns a black maid in a Jewish home in Lake Charles, LA, in the fall of 1963 and her relationship with the family's eight-year-old son who absent-mindedly leaves change in his pockets, might more appropriately have been applied to a short story. But Kushner, who needed two separate, very long plays to encompass his Angels in America, doesn't write miniatures. So, the slight story is made to bear the burden of American race relations and the trauma of the Kennedy assassination. Tesori, who wrote the new songs for the stage production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, sets Kushner's lyrics and dialogue to familiar styles of the period. This is a show in which inanimate objects -- a radio, a washing machine, a dryer, a bus, the moon -- are all alive and singing, and Tesori gives them each a genre. The radio, for example, personified by a female trio, sings in early-'60s girl group style, sometimes recalling Motown Records acts like the Supremes or a Phil Spector creation like the Crystals ("Santa Comin' Caroline," which begins the second act and the second disc, would fit on Spector's A Christmas Gift to You LP). The washing machine sounds like Aretha Franklin, while the devilish dryer is a blues singer in the mold of Bobby "Blue" Bland. Caroline herself, forcefully portrayed by Tonya Pinkins, sings in gospel tones as if channeling Mahalia Jackson. The Jewish family, on the other hand, with father Stuart (David Costabile) fingering the clarinet, is given klezmer music to sing to. Encompassing the entire sung-through show, the two-hour, two-CD cast album reflects the overblown nature of the stage production. There are many moments of lyrical wit and musical enjoyment, but Caroline, or Change is an enormous project built upon a small subject that cannot support its weight. William Ruhlmann