Say What I Wanna Say
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Back in August, Michael John LaChiusa ruffled many a “Birdcage” worth of feathers with a rant in Opera News on the sorry state of the American musical. It ran under the title – the editors’, not his – “The Great Gray Way,” and the opening paragraph, in one sentence, certainly got people’s attention: “The American Musical is dead.”
Coming from a composer, lyricist, and librettist whose next premiere was just weeks away, those were fighting words. In this paper, the review of Mr. LaChiusa’s new show – “See What I Wanna See,” at the Public Theater until December 4 – ran under the headline “One-Third of a Great Musical.” But there is room for second opinions.
To me, “See” is a construct of astonishing assurance. Tricky? Yes. (Mr. LaChiusa has called it “cubist.”) The show consists of two self-standing acts, each preceded by the same vignette of love and murder (played out from two opposite points of view). Act 1 revolves around a killing in Central Park; Act 2 concerns a miracle there. Both acts end with the words “the truth.”
From where I was sitting, the stories took fire instantly and added up perfectly. Singly and in tandem, they confounded expectations with an incontrovertible logic. After that gratuitous plunge into the hot water of polemics, I thought, Mr. LaChiusa was making a triumphant case right where it counts most: on the stage.
And he isn’t stopping for breath. In March, the Houston Grand Opera unveils “Send (who are you? I love you),” his new one-woman piece for Audra McDonald. Two days later, it’s opening night for his “House of Bernarda Alba,” at the Lincoln Center Theater, adapted from Lorca’s classic in collaboration with Richard Nelson.
Last week, en route to auditions for “Bernarda Alba,” Mr. LaChiusa took time out to talk of cabbages and kings, including the recent uproar.
“The American Musical is dead”? Of course he didn’t mean it. “I wrote an essay in an age when no one reads essays,” he protests. “You have to get past the first sentence.”
Fair enough. And what was that second sentence? “Now that that’s settled, let’s talk about something more lively: the American Musical.”
Mr. LaChiusa has earned the right to say so. Not only does he write musicals at a rate scarcely to be believed. He also gets produced, constantly. What is more, a LaChiusa show – “First Lady Suite” comes to mind – quite often passes on from its original production to a flourishing afterlife on stages across the country.
He has had his disappointments. In the 1999-2000 season, he opened two shows on Broadway, and neither landed. His take on Joseph Moncure’s Jazz Age novelette in verse, “The Wild Party,” came out at the same time as an off-Broadway version by Andrew Lippa. This town wasn’t big enough for both, and they canceled each other out; five years later, Mr. LaChiusa’s “Wild Party” is the toast of L.A. “Marie Christine,” a Southern Gothic “Medea,” was broke on arrival. Today, Mr. LaChiusa thinks he knows how to fix it.
“The musical is an art form Americans love,” he insists. “The media are just posturing when they claim that it’s marginal, that it’s dying out. Everyone wants to see a musical. Everyone wants to be in a musical. Everyone wants to write a musical.”
Mr. LaChiusa’s real target in Opera News was not the American musical per se. It was the Broadway musical as purveyed today (exhibits A,B, and C: “Hairspray,” “Wicked,” and “Spamalot”). He calls the dominant style “faux”: a copy of a copy. Shows like these – written to formula – may deliver theme-park thrills, but nothing more.
Given Mr. LaChiusa’s track record on Broadway, his arguments in Opera News had a certain tang of sour grapes. Confronted with that suggestion, Mr. LaChiusa shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’d have sour grapes about. I don’t begrudge other people’s success. It was a reality check of an environment that lives on lies. Maybe what you read is anger. The anger of someone who loves theatrical craft and adventure and derring-do. Anger that material of lesser quality is training audiences to settle for material of lesser quality.
“I like entertainment, too,” he continues. “I want it, and I hope I provide it. But I don’t just want the shell of an experience. I want something that’s filtered through a personality, a sensibility, something that you haven’t forgotten about by tomorrow morning. There’s nothing wrong with mindless entertainment. Just don’t call it art.”
Art feeds on art; the range of reference in Mr. LaChiusa’s work suggests that he reads 48 hours a day. It turns out that he never went to college, and that his early formal music education in his native Chautauqua, N.Y., consisted of three years of piano lessons, augmented by his mother’s collection of antique player-piano rolls, classical as well as popular.
In the summertime, he reveled in masterpieces of the 20th century, performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic under Michael Tilson Thomas, to the accompaniment of birdsong from outside the amphitheater. Fast forward to New York, where he played piano for Charles “Honi” Coles, the tap dancer, and Jerome Robbins, the choreographer – legends in their own time.
“I’m glad, really, that I didn’t go to school,” Mr. LaChiusa says. “For me, it’s a joy to do my homework, to catch up with everybody else.” All those people, that is, who have at their fingertips – for starters – contemporary Japanese short stories, turn-of-the-century Viennese plays, the Greeks. Right now, for a change, Mr. LaChiusa is reading up on string theory.
The self-taught may be apt scholars. As a songwriter, Mr. LaChiusa got started in kindergarten. His first effort, he recalls, was a weird rip-off of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” featuring a dead rabbit, squashed on the street. Fascinated, his teacher Mrs. Taylor made the whole class memorize it. Later, his fourth-grade teacher, the redoubtable Ann Hammer (still with us), had him write a class play with songs.
“It was some strange version of ‘The Honeymooners,'” Mr. LaChiusa reports. “The kids did it, loved it, and it made me very happy. When it was over, Mrs. Hammer said, ‘When you grow up, you should write musicals.’ Once Mrs. Hammer said it, I never doubted it.”
In Chautauqua, Mr. LaChiusa also acted, designed costumes, and directed. No more. “That’s not my forte,” he says. “When you’re writing the music and the lyrics and the dialogue, that’s enough. You feel like Sybil. I’m incorrigible. Sometimes I’ll tell my colleagues, ‘Hey! I have a great idea! This number must be cut!’ And they’ll look at each other and say to me, ‘You’re out of your effing mind. Give us time to show people what we need to show.’ I’m always the one who says, ‘It’s a show, not a tell.’ And then my dear comrades-in-crime have to remind me.'”
Art. It’s like poker. The rules are the rules. But every hand is a new deal.