Based on the play LILIOM by Hungarian master Ferenc Molnár (which inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel), JERICHO by award-winning screenwriter and playwright Michael Weller, revolves around the love affair between a scoundrel carousel barker and a maid at a Catholic Young Women’s Inn. His confused violent passion and her simple unshakable devotion, form the combustible heart of this dark fairytale for grown-ups. Staying true to Molnár’s marginal Budapest, Weller sets JERICHO at Coney Island during the Great Depression of the 1930s; a place and time when work was scarce, and life was a matter of desperate survival.

In Jericho, Michael Weller has created a provocative and disquieting expressionist narrative based on the beloved play Liliom, by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar. Similar in tone to Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, the lurid allegory, best known to theatregoers in the U.S. as the story that inspired Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein, is a darkly woven tale of love gone wrong. Beguiling sets and costumes by Julia Noulin-Mérat and Bevin McNally lead us in a completely different direction than the text, described by the author as “a dark fairy tale for adults.” Weller’s version of the story is set in during the Great Depression in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and the enchanting physical production soars. Above our heads, tiny carnival lights gently sway, offset by the sound of waves crashing ashore. It’s a bewitching misdirection. The story is “boy meets girl” with a metaphysical twist. The boy in the story is Jericho (played handsomely by Vasile Flutur) a carousel barker who is very popular with the local girls who work in a boarding house. Two of the girls meet up with Jericho, after he’s given them a ride on his carousel, late one afternoon. Mary (played with a broadly comic turn by …Read more