Word: lachiusa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
Michael John LaChiusa's Hello Again, currently playing at the cozy Boston Center for the Arts, tries incredibly hard to be sultry and irreverent in its comical look at sex. All types of sexualities--philandering housewives, been-there done-that prostitutes, straying husbands, and naive waifs--are thrown into LaChiusa's libidinous landscape. The play tackles not just run-of-the-mill sex, but sex between men and between people of different classes, sex in movie theaters and on futons, sex in the 1900s and 1960s...
...show's message is evident after the first few minutes--romantic love can be messy, disappointing, and confusing, but it can also be exciting, rewarding, and uplifting. The problem is that LaChiusa doesn't quite know how to bring originality to the timeworn themes of love and sex. And whoever thought up the idea of shining an extraordinarily bright and unbelievably unflattering yellow spotlight on actors' faces as they are climaxing, sure didn't help...