Portraying a maid in the 1960s South struggling with her finances and the emotional pressures of not one but two families, Clarke imbues the character with a quiet but smoldering intensity that galvanizes the musical into vivid, almost nerve-rattling life whenever she is center stage.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given that the complex book and lyrics are written by “Angels in America” author Tony Kushner, whose work has always been marked by a ferocious, inquisitive intelligence that does not easily make room for the kind of sentiment that is so often a hallmark of Broadway musicals.
In “Caroline, or Change,” Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori created a layered portrait of two families: the Gellmans, a Jewish family, and the family of their Black maid, Caroline — with a particular focus on the relationship between Caroline and the Gellmans’ 8-year-old son Noah .
Although she is bemused by the more activist agitation of her teenage daughter, Emmie , who is attuned to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, Caroline unknowingly embodies a rebuke to the racist status quo.
But more often, and particularly in her final solo, which all but blows the back wall off the theater , Clarke’s voice comes at you like a thunderbolt, so charged is it with an intensity of feeling, mostly of anger, frustration and righteousness.
The central strain in the plot is the one-way friendship between Caroline and Noah, a lonely only child whose mother has died, and who shows his own truculence in resisting the well-meaning efforts of his stepmother, Rose .
Conflict flares when Rose attempts to instill financial responsibility in Noah by suggesting that Caroline keep the change that Noah leaves in his pockets.
But much of what surrounds it — and there is quite a lot, with almost 20 roles in the show — is not always as captivating.
Levy provides Rose with a nice combination of unrequited affectionate and frazzled exasperation, as both Noah and even her still-mourning husband, Stuart, played with funny-sad vagueness by John Cariani, remain locked doors to which she cannot find the keys.
Almost equal attention is given to the divorced Caroline’s own family: Emmie , who becomes involved in the felling of a statue celebrating the Confederacy, and her two younger brothers.
The musical even takes time for considerable discussion of the assassination of John F.
All this is a lot to delineate with depth within the limited confines of a musical, despite the nicely fluid direction of Michael Longhurst.
Still, for this viewer, it is the unblinking yet compassionate portrait of the title character that lifts the show into the sublime, and Clarke’s performance — much like Tonya Pinkins’s in the original production — is the driving force behind its moments of transcendence.
McAllister, Harper Miles, N’Kenge, Nya, Richard Alexander Phillips, Jayden Theophile, Nasia Thomas, Jaden Myles Waldman, Samantha Williams, Stuart Zagnit and Chip Zien.