Resistance is futile. The music of "Carousel," with its hypnotic score and soaring love songs ("If I Loved You," "You'll Never Walk Alone"), has survived telethons, high school graduations and Simon Cowell. Now this Rodgers and Hammerstein perennial is back in L.A. with a fresh take and a rising new star.

Opening tonight at UCLA's Freud Playhouse, the Reprise staging of "Carousel" marks the American theater debut of Alexandra Silber, a Los Angeles-born talent already celebrated in London for her West End performance as Julie Jordan, a young mill worker in late-19th-century New England who falls hard for Billy Bigelow, a carnival barker torn between love and grift.

Silber -- Al to her friends -- is the vivid heart of director Michael Michetti's production, which also stars Robert Patteri ("The Scarlet Pimpernel," "Beauty and the Beast") as Billy. Veteran actor M. Emmett Walsh ("Youth in Revolt," "Blood Simple") plays the Starkeeper, the show's redemptive mystical figure.

In keeping with Reprise's focus on story over elaborate scenery, Michetti has Walsh reading some of Hammerstein's stage directions, evoking Thornton Wilder. The director wants to convey both the intimacy of the love story and its larger context.