Civic Theatre has Powerful Musical Comedy-Tragedy on Stage

Grand Rapids Civic Theatre, Grand Rapids Urban League, and Warner, Norcross and Judd have partnered to be the first to bring the Tony Award Nominated Musical "Caroline, or Change" to West Michigan audiences. Caroline, or Change shows the bittersweet world of a black maid and the hard life she knows and her community’s shifting hope in the 1963 Era of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Motown.

Race, rage and civil rights are at the heart of this deeply personal (semi-autobiographical) story by Tony Kushner (Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America). This is the story of Caroline Thibodeaux, a divorced mother of four, middle-aged African-American maid who works for a Jewish family – the Gellmans – in (1963) Louisiana. Caroline, a woman resistant to change and conflict, finds herself in the middle of a Gellman family conflict and changes in the world around her. The nation is in the middle of conflict and change: Vietnam, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Civil Rights Movement.

Beautifully told through the songs of Motown, delta blues, Gospel and Broadway; this multi-layered comedy-tragedy reminds us that ‘change come fast and change come slow, but everything changes’.