Listen to the Music

I just don’t “get” Michael John LaChiusa.

His prominence, to me, conjures up images of people who read Maus and refer to it as a “graphic novel” with no prior knowledge of its very high concept. Who sucks all the fun out of Broadway musicals? Stephen Sondheim, yeah, but even Anyone Can Whistle had a fifteen-minute jazz riff sequence that made fun of both Communists and Jews (let’s see Spamalot try to top that!). As far as Broadway (and Off-Broadway! Simultaneously!) musicals go, MJL comes pretty damn close to topping Sondheim on the dissonant, nondancing, atonal gloom scale.

I don't know if it's some latent fear of inevitably becoming elitist or if I'm in denial, or whether I really don't like him very much...I mean, I can't even bring myself to listen to The Wild Party. Don't get me wrong. Toni Collette rules. Mandy Patinkin is the shit. Eartha Kitt? No problemo. But I never liked that poem, and the Tony performance scared the hell out of me many years ago: I tend to associate the words "Wild Party" with the kind of PSD coupled with such stark terms as "Hindenberg," "Plague," "Holocaust," and "Song & Dance."

But I noticed this thread on Broadwayworld.com, and I really paid no mind to the works of this guy until now. Really. For a Broadway message board, those are some pretty valid insights.

Long story short, I hopped on over to Borders today to finally pick up a good twelve-dollar copy of the Gypsy soundtrack, and they ran out.

Frankly, I almost got Gypped into buying the Bernadette Peters version.

And I decided to just kill some time and listen to a bunch of showtune CDs on a pair of broken headphones at a listening station. I ended up getting City of Angels for $10.00, and, I don't know why...I was just compelled to buy the soundtrack to Bernarda Alba too.

Well, I don't know. I really had to process my thoughts on this. I just figured, I'll put it on low, listen to it while I nap for a good hour, and see how long it takes before I chuck it out and pop in God Bless the Go-Go's instead. I mean, the whole thing just smacks of low-rent Spider Woman. And we all know how much I loved that Tony performance when I was a kid. That is to say, didn't love it at all and had persistent nightmares about Brent Carver, in his underwear, coming to strangle me with his ragged feather boa.

Let's see, what is there to say about Bernarda Alba? I listened to it all the way straight through, and it was anything but a snoozer. I really had to sit still for about fifteen minutes just to process it, and, even then, I couldn't even open the refrigerator without being at least a little freaked out by the percussiveness of the freezer door opening.

I felt I owed it to myself to at least listen to this CD, let alone buy it. Maybe the best way to get acquainted with LaChiusa is to listen to all his stuff in reverse chronological order - that is, if I actually do like it. I mean, I always hear, "Rose? You are smart. You went to #)!%(#%@!, so therefore you must be extremely smart." To which I downplay my ultimate-downfall intellect and just reply, "Duhhh...What's a gard-dang Looniversity?" I need to start listening to smart music if I'm going to now live up to that generalization.

And, to me, musical theatre should be about a lot more than just razzle-dazzle and putting on a happy face. But I don't know how that works, exactly. Being a non-Equity, agentless nobody who didn’t go to a theatre school, I always feel like a turista in this arena. Look, they didn't have Gypsy, so, I just up and decided to buy this one. Which, in itself, is like saying, “I couldn’t find any Darth Vaders and ended up buying a General Grievous instead.”

Anyway, this is a high-concept Lincoln Center chamber operetta-type musical based on a play I hated having to read in college that everyone else loved, with no sets and lots of chairs that get moved around periodically to denote a location change. It might as well be Tom Stoppard: The Musical. You can just assume what the music and the accents and the overwhelming emotional heaving will sound like based almost solely on this information. All I know is, ever since Kiss of the Spider Woman, I just can’t listen to any flamenco-influenced musical score with classical guitars in the orchestra knowing full well that it will never, ever come close to topping “The Mexican” by Babe Ruth, or even Santa Esmeralda’s seventeen-minute-plus disco-funk epic “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

If you know the play, you know that this show is about how a family in turn-of-the-century Spain falls apart after the death of the patriarch. The sisters all wear black, ragged dresses with veils and are played by a wonderfully multicultural cast that is made up entirely of women, so we can all stop complaining about how there are no good roles for the ladies anymore. Like most musicals set within these terms, it’s always the pretty white girls who end up making complete asses out of themselves. And you’ve got Daphne Rubin-Vega as the Ugly Sister, Martirio; Judith Blazer as Magdalena, the narcoleptic sister who has sparkling, protruding-ly beautiful Peter Lorre eyes; Nikki M. James (Dorothy from The Wiz remake?) as Adela, the youngest and prettiest sister; Sally Murphy (Sally?) as Amelia, the quiet, soft-spoken sister; and Yolande Bavan (Hermione Gingold?) as the wise old grandmother who presides over the action. Bernarda is played by Phylicia Rashad, who I really didn’t know could actually sing. She sounds less like a trained, professional singer and more like a very nice woman who just loves to wrap her vocal cords around a melody. On the other hand, hearing her as a tyrannical matriarch on this will ensure that I can never watch “The Cosby Show” the same way ever again.

There is also a gloomy, ominous, singing female narrator, played by Nancy Ticotin, who assumes several different guises during the show. Hey, just like in Jeffrey!

Let's see, the characters each get individual songs where they agonize and wail about the anguish and sexual repression of being dominated by a male-owned society. My favorite would have to be Blazer's character song, because I didn't think it was humanly possible to do all that crazy stuff with your voice.

Of course, it's the little things here that bug me. Like the pretty, bland, young Irish lasses (Laura Shoop? Candy Buckley? Candy?) who play the maids and have to cut through the screamin' and hootin' and hollerin' with all that fancy colaratura. There's also a big, eleven o'clock "I Want" pop power ballad that comes in for a few seconds toward the beginning ("I'll wear my green dress, and I'll go outside..."), but, luckily, the treacle's cut through with a whole lot of angry flamenco stomping. And the things that I like are the ones I least expect. And I didn't even expect to like this at all! I thought I was going to hate it!

I can't help but feel like I should be criticizing this. I shouldn't have the free right to actually like it, but I don't think there's any true authorization for me to truly appreciate it as a musical theatre score. This should be something like The Light in the Piazza, which I really "get" and "loathe," because I am certifiably "smart," but, whenever I'm around my musical-theatre friends who gush about how supposedly "great" and "wonderful" it is, I just drool and go straight into "duh" mode. Shouldn't I be calling this show out on its own pretentiousness and hawking money to keep smart but nontheless mainstream, populist fluff like The Drowsy Chaperone going for another year? Am I making any sense?

Still? Mrs. Huxtable.