Word: lachiusa
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...Wild Party, version A, which opens on Broadway in April, boasts the biggest firepower: a star cast that includes Mandy Patinkin, Eartha Kitt and Oscar nominee (for The Sixth Sense) Toni Collette; music and lyrics by highly touted young composer Michael John LaChiusa (Marie Christine); and direction by co-adapter George C. Wolfe, head of New York City's Public Theater. But their show is being beaten to the boards by The Wild Party, version B, with book, music and lyrics by less highly touted young composer Andrew Lippa (who contributed some bouncy new numbers to the recent Broadway revival...
...this happen? Lippa says he discovered the poem in a bookstore in 1995 and saw it as a chance to write "my Cats," referring to the soon-to-close Andrew Lloyd Webber show based on T.S. Eliot's poetry. LaChiusa says he first read the poem even earlier--1994, so there!--though he didn't start to work on it for nearly three years. Lippa's version was the first to be staged, in a workshop production at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in the summer of 1997. (LaChiusa's had its first reading a few months...
Enter Marie Christine, probably the most highly anticipated of this new art-musical genre. Lyrics and music are by Michael John LaChiusa, one of the most acclaimed of the post-Sondheim composers. It has a story of thematic heft and historical color: a retelling of the Medea myth, set in the Creole society of New Orleans in the 1890s. It stars Audra McDonald, the three-time Tony Award winner who showcased the music of LaChiusa and other art composers on her CD Way Back to Paradise. And it has received an extraordinary buildup from the New York Times, the Only...
...Marie's lover (Anthony Crivello, solid if a bit too modern) from itinerant seaman to rising machine politician is not adequately explained--nor is the matter of why an ambitious candidate in 1890s Chicago would find it advantageous to claim two mixed-race kids as his own. Most crucial, LaChiusa's multihued, melodically challenging music is more effective in evoking folkloric tradition than in helping us scale the cathartic heights this operatic show is aiming for. Amplified guitars, anyone...
...this the hushed lyricism of Jenny Giering's I Follow and the mordant merriment of Michael John LaChiusa's Mistress of the Senator, and you've got a collection guaranteed to make intelligent theater-music fans prick up their ears. There's only one catch: Way Back to Paradise contains scenes, arias, and even full-blown art songs. But nostalgia-hungry listeners will search in vain among these determinedly theatrical post-Sondheim musical monologues for anything resembling the straightforward, crisply turned lyrics and incisive 32-bar melodies that for decades defined American popular music at its best...