Michael John LaChiusa is the first songwriter of our era to have two of his shows debut on Broadway in the same season. His Marie Christine opened in December 1999, and his The Wild Party in April. This hadn't happened since Rodgers & Hart had two openings during the 1929-1930 season. (For theater buffs: they were Heads Up! in November 1929 and Simple Simon in February 1930.)
LaChiusa had the added distinction of seeing, within one 48-hour period, the release of one new show album and the recording sessions of another. The Wild Party was recorded April 17, 2000, and RCA released the CD of Marie Christine April 18.
What a time for celebrating, you might say.
Well, not totally. Because within that same 48-hour period came the announcement that the Outer Critics Circle snubbed both Marie Christine and The Wild Party when nominating the best Broadway musicals of the season. To rub salt in LaChiusa's wound, a competing version of The Wild Party, the one composed by Andrew Lippa, was nominated as Best Off-Broadway Musical by those critics. LaChiusa doesn't think much about awards, but many of his friends and colleagues were upset. Then, two weeks later, LaChiusa received Tony Award nominations as best composer for both Marie Christine and The Wild Party, as well as author of the best book, with George C. Wolfe, for Party.
How did LaChiusa react to this? "I'm feeling very good," he told this writer. "I'm excited more than anything else. It's hard and it's expensive to do something a little more daring on Broadway, but at the same time it's a thrill to be here. So there's excitement and fatigue. During the previews there were rehearsals of new material for six hours each day, then the evening performance. It's tough work. Show business only seems glamorous to people who are not in it." Michael John says he wasn't nervous about his opening nights and he seems remarkably calm about negative notices: "I don't answer critics. I say just listen and if you like it, good. Music is a subjective experience. So be it. Some people have a larger heart and go to the theater with all their senses open to take on new experiences. If you have expectation just to hear traditional AABA 32-bar songs, I'm not caring about that. I'm only thinking about my characters and what the setting demands, what the drama demands. In The Wild Party, these characters are in the Roaring Twenties, so I've written some Tin Pan Alley songs. The music becomes distorted as the evening progresses and we go deeper into their psyche and realize that they're shattered souls, and the songs begin to reflect that shattering. But in the first part of the show their masks are intact and there are some 32-bar songs."
He has a sense of humor about criticism. When I told LaChiusa that a friend of mine disliked The Wild Party, he playfully berated me: "What are you doing hanging out with tone-deaf people?" Though much has been written this year about his two shows, LaChiusa is little known. Sondheim biographer Meryle Secrest tells how she once conversed with Sondheim on the street outside his Manhattan office and passersby didn't know who he was; they walked right by. If that happens with Sondheim, imagine how much more anonymous is LaChiusa. Even his name is unfamiliar. A member of one of his producing organizations recently talked to me about him and badly mangled the pronunciation of his last name (pronounced La-kyoo'-sa).
He is slender, blonde, 5'8" in height, athletic looking yet with an aura of reserve. When you get to know him, that austerity vanishes and you see the animated, humorous man beneath. Born in Chatauqua, NY, on July 24, 1962, his dad was a football coach and his mother a housewife. His double name came "because my mother couldn't decide." He has younger brothers named Thomas and Matthew. Tom teaches theater at Binghampton and Matt is a sommelier -- "a wine guy," as Michael John puts it -- in Buffalo. It was Matt who sent Michael John a book on New Orleans folklore which got him started on the Americanization of the Medea story that became Marie Christine. Opera was the background music in the Italian-American LaChiusa home. He graduated early from high school and didn't go to college. "My family couldn't afford it," he says. "I moved to Boston and did summer stock. Then to Manhattan at age 18 in 1980. I was a rehearsal pianist and began writing musicals around 1983 and 1984 at Playwrights Horizons and La MaMa. Did the whole downtown East Side scene.
"I wish I could have afforded to go to school and learn orchestration," LaChiusa says. "But I had to make do with what I had, and I studied on my own, going and listening to everything that my wallet could afford. There's no merit in being self taught, you know. That's just the way it was for me. I learned a lot from Jonathan Tunick, working with him on Petrified Prince and Marie Christine. He's one of the greatest who's ever orchestrated for the American theater. I learned a lot going measure for measure through the scores with him, asking questions like: `Why would that work there?' What would make this easier for the singer,' and so on."
He describes his compositional method. "I have an eclectic palette and try to use as much source material as I can. I approach a show from the character's standpoint and secondly from where and what time it's set. For instance, for Marie Christine I looked at the music that was happening in America at the turn of the century, particularly in the Creole culture in Louisiana and Chicago, where the story is set. I pick the emotional moments for each character and try to come up with a harmonic palette and weave in the melodies that I think the characters might sing."
LaChiusa asks himself the question: "What sounds were being made at that time?" Then he filters those sounds "through whatever it is that I filter through. Through my own voice? I'm not sure yet what that voice is, but I want it to be original, something listeners have never heard before. There's a mystery about it, to me, still. I try to surprise myself and challenge myself. I try to let the characters dictate what they're going to sing and feel and what their psychological subtext is, emotional state of mind is. It's sort of like channeling if you want to call it that."
He admits that melody isn't of paramount importance to him. "To me, it's rhythm that I always go to first, because I started as a percussionist and I like to find a beat. I write on the piano and on the drums. I try to find a fun rhythm. I'm even fascinated by rap music. Some people say rap is bad and it's so not." Don't think that he's hostile to melody. Though characterization and rhythm are most important to him, he doesn't write atonal music. He writes melodies, though the public has yet to embrace them, and some critics say his music is difficult. It makes you stop and remember that Sondheim was accused of the same thing before "Send in the Clowns" became a pop standard. And even earlier, before West Side Story became well known, Leonard Bernstein complained that people always said to him: "Why can't you write a good old Gershwin melody?"
LaChiusa has an interesting observation when people say they can't hear his tunes: "We're at a disadvantage because producers can't afford to give us the big orchestras of two generations ago. When people complain that they don't hear melody, it's not that there aren't any. Maybe what they mean is they don't hear our melodies played by big string sections!"
He points out major differences between himself and such giants of the past as Richard Rodgers, Gershwin & Berlin: "I'm two generations removed from that classical period of American popular music, when they had full string sections in the pit. In fact, I don't think of myself as a popular song writer. Obviously I'm not. The times have changed so. What's a popular song? There are 50 different Top Ten charts in different genres. So I try to create theater and dramatic music and I try to expand the boundaries of it. I believe Hal Prince when he says that musical theater can be a forum where you can discuss social and political issues as well as emotional issues. My colleagues and I do that. We do have something in common with Rodgers & Hammerstein and Kurt Weill after all. More than with Andrew Lloyd Webber." LaChiusa's early works were one-acters at Playwrights Horizon: Break, Agnes, Eulogy for Mr. Hamm and Lucky Mirrors. His first full-length musical never got produced. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, adapted from the Edward Albee play, had to be abandoned when Albee wouldn't give the rights to the story. "In 1995 First Lady Suite at the Public Theater got me some notice, and it was followed a month later by Hello Again." This was the first LaChiusa show to be recorded, by RCA. "Sort of what I did this season with Marie Christine and Wild Party, but then they weren't on Broadway."
"I played my stuff for Hal Prince," continued LaChiusa, "and he was intrigued and we began work on Petrified Prince based on the Ingmar Bergman version. We did it at the Public and it was a total flop, but I find Hal to be an extremely generous, wise collaborator." LaChiusa debuted on Broadway in 1997 with Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a dance musical collaboration with Graciela Daniele.
LaChiusa became one of the small group of composers asked, in 1994, by producer Garth Drabinsky to try out for the job of writing Ragtime. "We all had to write 12 to 15 minutes of music and send an audition tape to Drabinsky. I was up against some composers and songwriting teams that were much better known than I." Nevertheless, LaChiusa was among the finalists before the job was awarded to Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. "They kept our identities confidential, but I don't mind telling you," he discloses. And he confirms that some instrumental music in Marie Christine was re-cycled from his Ragtime effort. When Wild Party started previews it ran 2 hours 40 minutes. By opening night it was trimmed to one hour 53. Clearly, LaChiusa had to cut a lot of music, and it was painful. "I keep a dead baby trunk. Literally a trunk. Every once in awhile I take a song out and try to re-use it in another show. But those dead babies bite you in the ass nearly every time and you have to let them die again." One song in Wild Party, however, came from the trunk. Wild Party's "What Makes Me Tick" originally was written for scene eight of Hello Again, where a writer and actress meet in the 1920's.
Meanwhile LaChiusa wrote lyrics for operas in Houston and Philadelphia - including an opera about Patty Hearst, Tanya, with composer Anthony Davis. "I go to the opera a lot. I practically live in the opera house."
Much has been written about that circle of theater composers surrounding LaChiusa, including Jason Robert Brown, Ricky Ian Gordon, Adam Guettel and Jeanine Tesori, as if they were a musical group. Actually, there are big differences in their styles, but it's true that they are friends. They came together because of the way shows are developed in our era: Songwriters apply to foundations who award development grants, and the foundations often put previous winners in contact with the contestants. In addition, workshops bring together a number of writers working in collaboration. For example, Ira Weitzman at Playwrights Horizons once asked LaChiusa and Guettel to work on a show together.
LaChiusa remembers that he met Mary Rodgers -- Richard's daughter, Adam Guettel's mother -- after he was awarded a grant by the Richard Rodgers Foundation. "Mary is the mother of us all.' She's a total mama, a mother hen to many of us and I'm one of her chicks. She's taken such good care of us, God bless her. She' s a very good composer and I wish she'd write more. She has a great ear for rhythm and harmonic changes that are so colorful. You can hear where Adam comes from in some of Mary's beautiful harmonic changes." Through Mary, Michael John was introduced to Guettel and the others. Brown became a friend when he was LaChiusa's musical director on Petrified Prince. That's how they came to be friends, and it's a contrast to the way old-time composers related to each other. In the 1920s, Rodgers & Hart, Gershwin and Berlin were so busy putting on new shows -- two a year was not uncommon -- that they didn't have time to socialize with other composers. But the songwriters who emerged in the 1990s have to endure years of waiting during the development of each of their shows. Therefore they have lots of time on their hands to seek the company and advice of their colleagues. Though friends, members of the group have big compositional differences. For example, Guettel's melodies are high-flying and wide ranging, while LaChiusa chooses to keep notes within a narrower range as they bounce along on a rhythmic locomotive. But LaChiusa talks about their social bond: "They're all such swell guys and gals. Terrific people. They are so supportive of me and I cherish that. I call on them for help. I phone them and say `Come take a look at my stuff. Do I need to do anything differently? Can you hear that lyric? What do you think about that?' There's competition to get grants and jobs, but I don't feel competitive. Our voices are different, though that might not be discernable to outsiders who are eager to label what they don't know. If they put a name on it, maybe that makes it more safe for them. That's fine; it doesn't matter to me."
LaChiusa's next work has been commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Goodman Theater for June 2001. He thinks of it as a musical, not an opera. Michael John describes the work, called Enigma Variations: "America's poet laureate, turning 70, marriage coming apart, is asked to write the inaugural poem for a new president of the United States. Friends come and join him for the week. One old friend, a World War II buddy of his, comes with the disturbing revelation that a French woman, who was the poet's lover and then was killed, left behind a book of poetry. And the poems in it are identical to the first ones published by the poet laureate after the war. So who wrote them? And is he a fraud? That's the enigma. Who makes what? And where does creativity come from?"
What's the unifying theme in LaChiusa's body of work? "I love to tell a good story. I like to play with rhythm, and there's lots of rhythmic changes in my material. I love working with chromatics, trying to create color. I experimented with that in Wild Party. I'm deeply influenced by Steve Reich, John Adams, Philip Glass and John Corigliano and their craft and palettes. And I wish someday I could write a lyric as brilliantly as Steve Sondheim. I admire that man so much. `In Buddy's Eyes' makes me just weep.
"I'm still learning and trying to define myself. I always feel uncomfortable talking about it. I just hope my music sings to somebody."
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