IT’S an odd title that Tony Kushner, the author of Angels in America, and the composer Jeanin Tesori have given their musical. Caroline Thibodeaux is the black maid who irons and irons day after day, year after year, in the basement of a liberal Jewish family’s house in Louisiana.

But why: "Or Change"? Maybe because it is 1963, year of the rise of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement - and it’s come in time for Caroline’s children but not for Tonya Pinkins’s doggedly enduring, implacably unchanging, Caroline herself.

As directed by George C. Wolfe, this New York import is big, bold yet of human scale. The moon, a lady in a white gown, appears and sings. So do a radio embodied by three Supreme-like girls in golden sheaths, a washing machine that’s a woman in a red turban, and the rickety dryer which is Clive Rowe in a hairdo that makes him look like a blend of Robbie Coltrane and Liberace.

All stand on a balcony above Caroline’s symbolically deep basement as she stares, broods, grimly pouts, communicates in blunt one-liners and generally exudes resentment.

Great events are occurring outside, not least the death of a Kennedy who is warily praised by the local blacks as their "almost friend", but indoors all seems pretty banal.

Nine-year-old Noah Gellman’s mother is dead and his aloof, ineffective father has married her best friend Anna Francolini’s Rose, whom the boy despises as much as he admires balky, blooded-minded Caroline. Rose is fussy and pernickety and is particularly irritated by the coins Perry Millward’s appealing young Noah is apt to leave in the trousers Caroline has to wash.

Here’s the title’s second significance. Rose tells Caroline she can keep any loose change she finds. Knowing that the maid is divorced and her family desperately poor, Noah then deliberately leaves cents and quarters in his pockets. Grimly, Caroline pockets the small change but refuses the notes, only to take the $20 bill Noah didn’t wish to lose. Trivial stuff? Yes, but Kushner builds the incident into an example of the tense, difficult relationship of well-meaning, but limited, whites and suspicious blacks in an America in a social flux that continues today.

Politically germane arguments break out in both Thibodeaux and Gellman households and reach an ironic climax when Caroline’s daughter, a political activist who rejects her mother’s quietism yet believes in non-violence, quarrels with Rose’s father, a New York Marxist who wants blacks to "blow the bastards to kingdom come". At least I think that’s what he declares, because virtually every word is sung and at times the lyrics blur a bit.

Then again, I wondered how impressive the evening would be if Wolfe’s cast spoke lines that don’t exactly soar. But that’s a test almost every opera or sung-through musical would fail. As it is, Tesori’s score, which embraces Afro-American and Jewish music, rock and blues and gospel, does help to give the evening the size and significance it’s in danger of lacking. That’s nowhere more the case than at the denouement when Pinkins renounces the hate she thinks has made her evil, accepts people different from herself, and commits herself to a gritty survival.

Conservative stuff? Not as the brilliant Pinkins belts it out. She’s uneducated, she’s been wronged - and she’s by far the bravest spirit on stage.

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