THEATER REVIEW : No Ordinary ‘Carousel,’ an Excellent One : This intensely smart version takes one of the darkest shows from the golden age of American musicals and turns it into our own ‘Blue Velvet.’

From the moment the orchestra begins its off-kilter waltz at the Beaumont, we know this is no ordinary “Carousel.” Instead of the carnival bustling to the opening rhythms, there is a haunting line of gray factory women moving like zombie automatons at a long weaving machine.

By the time the big clock strikes 6 and the drones are set free to change into vibrant youngsters in the twinkling amusement park, standard crowd-scene merriments have already lost their innocence. These are not stock-happy 19th-Century New England town folk in a revival of a Rodgers & Hammerstein chestnut.

In fact, except for some shocking weaknesses in several critical roles, there is not a speck of stock about this intensely smart and magnificently reinvented “Carousel.” Nicholas Hytner, who first staged it to enormous acclaim in London, has re-cast all but one part for Lincoln Center.

Hytner is going for an ensemble drama with music here, using Richard Rodgers’ ambitiously extended musical set pieces to propel the dark story, and understating, as much as possible, the tendency of Oscar Hammerstein’s book to turn to preachy pap. The acting is relaxed and remarkably natural for a musical, and everyone--not just the superb dance chorus in Kenneth MacMillan’s mostly splendid and thoughtful balletic choreography--knows how to move.

Bob Crowley’s sets, morphing on a computerized turntable, are almost inconceivably beautiful: deeply poetic visions of a fishing village enveloped in a universe of perpetual night blue.

Hytner has taken one of the very darkest shows from the golden age of American musicals and turned it into our own “Blue Velvet.” Beneath the pretty lawns and behind the jolly clambakes is Billy beating his loving wife, Julie, while she claims it doesn’t hurt at all. Decent women are cynical about dull marriages. There is heartless lust, rough justice, an anti-hero who kills himself, cycles of poverty and violence that seem unlikely to stop.

“Carousel,” which came after the breakthrough of “Oklahoma!” and before “South Pacific,” was Rodgers’ favorite score, and Eric Stern’s orchestra reminds us why. The show goes boldly into the developing territory of integrated story, music and dance.

There is the courageous “If I Loved You”--a 12-minute love duet in contrary-to-fact subjunctive where the lovers never actually sing together. There’s the 17-minute fairground ballet, dangerously close to the finale, where Sandra Brown, an American Ballet Theatre dancer with a blissfully expressive attack and a taffy spine, shows Billy how his troubled daughter may be turning out.

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And, of course, there is Billy, the carnival barker, who feels trapped by his marriage to Julie, but is almost saved by news of her pregnancy--and delivers an exhilarating soliloquy about “my boy, Bill.” Hayden, a Juilliard graduate who became a sensation in this role in London, stresses the man’s vulnerability over his brute qualities, using his baby-faced youth to suggest a man who still might possibly change his future. But Hayden has surprisingly little sexual presence for such a stud, and his voice--a tenor in the baritone role--lacks power, low notes and pitch accuracy when pushed.

Sally Murphy makes a light, unexceptional but pleasant Julie, but the secondary couple--Audra Ann McDonald’s terrific and lusty Carrie and Eddie Korbich’s stuffy Enoch--steal the show. Fisher Stevens has a contemporary sense of menace that may strike some as anachronistic--and he growls instead of sings--but his villain Jigger is an entertaining wharf rat.

Agnes de Mille would not have approved of the empty male ballet tricks that derail Louise’s coming-of-age anguish. But the rest of the choreography, created by MacMillan just before he died, gives the sailors a lusty hornpipe for “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” and has the bad boys insinuate themselves through “Blow High, Blow Low” as if stomping bugs.

More typical than such humor--and more important than the vocal weaknesses--is the fearless, uncompromising power of the production. We may argue whether such a sure commercial hit, co-produced by Cameron Mackintosh and first staged in London, belongs in a nonprofit house. Perhaps producers worried that a Broadway audience would be afraid of the dark. They can relax now.