Broadway's new music man

You may not have heard of composer and writer Michael John LaChiusa, but two of his innovative musicals are up for Tony Awards tonight. But his works are no Phantom. Is Broadway ready to redefine itself?

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

NEW YORK -- The biggest hits on Broadway are the oldies but goodies, revivals of classic musicals like Kiss Me, Kate and The Music Man. They'll do well tonight when the Tony Awards are handed out at Radio City Music Hall.

TV preview The Tony Awards air tonight from 8 to 9 on WEDU-Ch. 3 and from 9 to 11 on WTSP-Ch. 10.

But Cole Porter and Meredith Willson -- the late composers of Kiss Me, Kate and The Music Man, respectively -- have nothing on Michael John LaChiusa, who wrote a pair of musicals, The Wild Party and Marie Christine, that have been nominated for a total of a dozen Tonys this year.

You might expect LaChiusa, nominated for best score and book for both shows (he co-wrote the book for The Wild Party with director George C. Wolfe), to be on top of the world, but he sounded cautious about his chances of winning a Tony a week or so ago.

"I'm very humbled by it all," he said. "But being nominated twice in both categories sort of cancels each other out, so I'm bracing myself."

Marie Christine, which transplanted the Greek tragedy Medea to New Orleans, closed months ago, but The Wild Party is still running and could use the boost that a Tony can provide at the box office. In fact, producers of the show, which opened to mixed reviews in April, were thinking of closing it before its surprisingly strong showing of seven nominations. Even with a stellar cast topped by Mandy Patinkin, Toni Collette and Eartha Kitt, the musical has been playing to an average of just more than 50 percent capacity.

[Publicity photo] Composer/lyricist Michael John LaChiusa is a four-time Tony Award nominee for The Wild Party and Marie Christine.

Compared to Marie Christine and his earlier Hello Again, The Wild Party is LaChiusa's most accessible work, but it still has plenty of his characteristically dark, difficult music -- a mix of opera and jazz and art song, rhythmically complex and often dissonant. It is not a show that sends the audience home humming a catchy tune.

"I think the opening minute and a half of The Wild Party -- the harmony, the brashness of it -- is the announcement of an exciting new voice in American musical theater," said composer/lyricist Maury Yeston, a two-time Tony winner for Titanic and Nine, who taught LaChiusa in the BMI musical theater workshop in the 1980s.

"But I don't think it's ever going to be a show that plays to the bus-and-tunnel trade. They aren't going to be busing them in from eastern Pennsylvania in the same way they do for shows like Miss Saigon. It's not Annie; it's not Hello, Dolly!"

The Wild Party is based on a Prohibition-era poem by Joseph Moncure March, whose tabloid yarn of small-time theater folk and grifters on a binge was banned in Boston when it was first published in 1928. The poem was rediscovered by New Yorker cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who did the racy illustrations for a new edition in 1994. LaChiusa came across that book and decided it was just the thing for a musical.

"I thought it was this great, nasty little poem, a long night's journey into day," said LaChiusa, who was fascinated by the opening lines:

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,

And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.

Grey eyes.

Lips like coals aglow.

Her face was a tinted mask of snow.

Making her Broadway debut, Collette (nominated for an Oscar for her role as the single mother in The Sixth Sense) is a revelation as the "sexually ambitious" Queenie. She's a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and girlfriend of Burrs, a brutish stage clown played by Patinkin, sometimes in blackface. Together, they create a compellingly seedy portrayal of the underbelly of show business.

Toni Collette plays Queenie, a dancer. Queenie and a vaudeville clown named Burrs (Mandy Patinkin) throw The Wild Party.

When Burrs and Queenie throw a party, the cast of characters runs the sexual and racial and sociocultural gamut, including a faded diva named Dolores (in a campy turn by Kitt), a pair of Jewish producers, a lesbian stripper and her latest flame, a prizefighter and his mistress, a gay piano duo in matching checked jackets, a "third-rate Valentino" who takes a shine to Queenie and assorted other scenemakers.

The bathtub gin flows, and there are lots of drugs to be had in this "room full of strangers who call themselves friends."

Bizarrely, the March poem was taken up by another New York theater composer, Andrew Lippa, whose musical with the same title was also performed this season in an off-Broadway production. It opened before the LaChiusa version, got less than wonderful reviews and had a short run.

Clearly, this Jazz Age morality tale, which ends with a shooting and the cops rushing in to break up the party, speaks to some people nowadays. To LaChiusa, it mirrors the U.S. economic boom.

"It is our metaphor for our country right now," he said. "We've seen great prosperity. What happens when we take away that prosperity and all the good things that have come with it? What are we left with as Americans? What happens when this party ends?"

From a purely compositional standpoint, The Wild Party is the only true musical up for the Tony for best musical. None of the other three nominees -- Contact, Swing! and James Joyce's The Dead -- has an original score. Nor is any a traditional book musical that tells a story through songs that move the dramatic action along.

Contact is a dance show that has prerecorded music and no singing. Swing! is a dance revue that features classic swing music, though at least its score is performed by a live band. In The Dead, which is no longer running, the Irish songs were incidental to the drama adapted from a Joyce short story.

Last year, the Tony for best musical went to a dance revue, Fosse, a compilation of numbers from shows directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. The possibility that the Tony could again go to something other than a book musical has led some theater people, including LaChiusa, to propose adding a category for revues to the awards.

Director Wolfe knows a thing or two about unconventional musicals. He conceived and directed Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, the tap-dance musical for which he won a Tony in 1996. That show expanded the definition of musical theater, and he thinks The Wild Party is equally innovative.

"I think it breaks the mold in terms of intensity of subject matter," Wolfe said. "Also in the way that there is an extraordinary level of fluidity between text and music, between what is spoken and what is sung. The characters sing and speak in dialogue. There's a seamlessness to the text. The show is completely through-composed, but occasionally the text is sung, and occasionally it is spoken."

The Wild Party, which runs about two hours, is a rarity on Broadway in that it doesn't have an intermission. "A lot of people were against that," Wolfe said. "But there are no breaks in a party. When you do take a break, you gain perspective. What this piece is about is these people losing perspective, and I wanted the audience to lose perspective as well."

Wolfe is producer of New York's not-for-profit Joseph Papp Public Theater, which co-produced The Wild Party and stands to take a heavy loss if the $5-million show fails to find an audience. The Public's last Broadway production, On the Town, was an expensive flop.

A month ago, Wolfe took the unusual step of going on public television's Charlie Rose Show to criticize the New York Times' theater critic, Ben Brantley, who panned The Wild Party. Conventional wisdom says a Broadway play doesn't have a chance if it gets a bad review in the Times.

"He began the review by discussing On the Town as well as this show and calling into question whether we should be doing such shows," Wolfe said. "That's not his job. His job is to review the show. I thought his review was a personal attack on the artists involved."

LaChiusa is getting accustomed to mixed notices.Marie Christine, his vehicle for the remarkable singer Audra McDonald, divided critics and audiences even more than The Wild Party.

In some ways, the 37-year-old composer courts controversy, with angular music on thorny themes. Though he loves shows like South Pacific ("My favorite musical, the perfect blend of music, book and character,") he sees the function of musical theater as different than it was in the 1940s and '50s.

"I think the classic musicals -- from Oklahoma! on -- were written in a time when people were very fearful and needed to go to the theater to feel safe and at peace," he said. "Therefore, you had that golden age of musicals when things were fun and joyful."

Now, in more or less peaceful times, LaChiusa thinks musical theater should be challenging.

"I want to make a theater where people go and they are disturbed, they are angered, where they are allowed to feel those feelings of rage or disappointment or hurt. Because in real life, we're not supposed to be depressed, we're not supposed to be angry, we're not supposed to exhibit rage. That's okay, but I think theater can be a place where people can feel what they're not supposed to feel."

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