Taking a Chance on A Wide-Eyed Heroine

Naivete -- as charming as the trait remains in our cynic-soaked world -- is generally considered in dangerously short supply. Pity, then, the casting directors of "Carnival!," which places at its center the character of 16-year-old orphan Lili, an uber-ingenue of the highest order. There are few girls on the planet (not even on musical theater's raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens planet) whose eyes are as wide as Lili's. And the Bob Merrill musical, despite a successful and critically acclaimed run in the early '60s, has never been revived on Broadway.

Coincidence?

No matter, says the Kennedy Center, which is exactly what you'd think the institution would say. This is, after all, the place that never met a show it considered unrevivable, and if recent exhumations haven't exactly proved the wisdom of that attitude (see "The Subject Was Roses," "Mame"), the center's cockeyed optimism remains undaunted, its aesthetic eyes as wide as saucers.

One of the happy beneficiaries of this credulity is Ereni Sevasti, a young New Jersey native who, despite being completely unknown outside her environs, was cast as Lili by director Robert Longbottom (who, come to think of it, successfully helmed the hitherto-unrevivable "Mister Roberts" in 2005). Like Lili, who joins a traveling French carnival on a whim, Sevasti had almost no idea what she was getting herself into. At least not last week, when reached by phone at her home in Jersey. At that moment, she had never performed a lead role in a major production, had visited the Eisenhower Theater only once and, most crucially, had yet to see those giant banners -- whipping fiercely in the February wind outside the Kennedy Center -- depicting her as a girl in a straw hat transfixed by the midway.

"I come from a big, fat Greek family," Sevasti said, "and I actually don't think they get it yet." The daughter of a construction worker and a real estate agent, and the youngest of four siblings, the 28-year-old actress has the sort of résumé ("I understudied for Liesl and Luisa in Paper Mill Playhouse's 'Sound of Music' ") that might inspire alarm. But then you hear about Sevasti's rehearsal experience, at which point it begins to seem like a bit of casting genius was involved.

"The creative team that we're working with, from the sets to the costumes to the puppets to the magic -- it's just too beautiful!" Sevasti said. "We have some jugglers, some aerialists. . . . It's going to be a spectacle. I'm not kidding!"

If jugglers and aerialists have long ceased to enchant you, then you've never heard Sevasti on the subject, a monologue that leaves you -- take my word for it -- believing again in the possibilities of circus life. And it's worth noting that the original Broadway production, led by legendary impresario Gower Champion, won over a skeptical New York crowd, too, with its "power to renew tarnished pleasures," as the Times put it. The story itself, of Lili's infatuation with magician Marco the Magnificent (here played by Sebastian La Cause) even as she is wooed by Paul the socially challenged puppeteer (Jim Stanek), is not one of Broadway's most compelling, but there are a few wonderful songs. Among the most charming is Lili's first, "Mira," where she introduces herself thus:

I come from a town, the kind of town, where you live in the house 'til the house falls down, but if it stands up you stay there.

It's funny but that's their way there.

"It's a throwback to what life was like when it was beautiful in her home, when she had a home," Sevasti noted. "Now she's parentless and lonely and looking for someone. Unfortunately, the first person she sees is Marco."

Sevasti herself was luckier, running into noted Manhattan acting instructor William Esper ("brilliant teachers have a way of getting to know you on the level you need to be understood," she said) and enrolling in a two-year program at his studio before beating out scores of actresses during open auditions for "Carnival!" in New York and Washington in the fall. It has all happened a bit quickly for Sevasti -- "I still have moments where I'm just weak" -- but she's smart enough to know that, for an actress channeling Lili, a little vulnerability is all to the good.

"Everyone was wondering why there wasn't a name in the role," she said. "I don't know! I'm just happy they decided to go the way they did."

Carnival! Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater 202-467-4600 Saturday through March 11