It’s been an unusually musicals-heavy January, and with Jeanine Tesori’s
Caroline, or Change currently transferred to the Playhouse, a few feet away her 1997 show (with book and lyrics by Brian Crawley) gets its UK debut at the Charing Cross Theatre. Another link to the composer’s more recent work is
Fun Home’s leading lady Kaisa Hammarlund, looking significantly less like Sue Perkins as she takes the title role in
Violet. Set in the Southern US states in 1964, Violet is a woman who was hit in the face with an axe by her father when she was 13 (probably by accident, although she doesn’t seem entirely convinced.) The resulting scar makes people recoil at the sight of her, and as the play opens she’s leaving her small North Carolina town and getting on a Greyhound bus to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to see a televangelist and faith healer she hopes can restore her looks.
