Is a good old-fashioned musical just what the world needs today? Perhaps so. But director Julianne Boyd may have gone too far in her current revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1945 musical Carousel, now at Barrington Stage, in trying to summon a simpler era. Aside from a scene that simulates a carousel ride, her staging is unimaginative and the novelty quotient nil. And nothing Boyd does (or says in her program note) can mask the fact that the decidedly dated work comes across as an endorsement for the notion of spousal abuse.

Moreover, even in this era of John Doylesque cost-cutting, the orchestration for just two pianos -- plus for a brief, engaging moment, a fiddler (Edmund Bagnell) to e[...]