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"Listen to the music, music doesn't lie," a middle-aged, married man tells the young man he is seducing in a stateroom on board the Titanic in Michael John LaChiusa's new musical, Hello Again.
Some important people in musical theatre --the kind who make and shape careers--have been listening to LaChiusa's music and lyrics for nearly a decade Off Broadway, convinced that his work, both comic and tragic--and terribly cynical--would have its day.
Indeed, LaChiusa's time seems to have arrived. First Lady Suite, his musical vignettes of Jackie Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt (with Amelia Earhart, Marian Anderson, Lorena Hickock, Margaret and Bess Truman, and others making cameo appearances) was produced in December at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Hello Again, LaChiusa's first full-length musical, based on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde and directed by Graciela Daniele, opened the following month as part of Lincoln Center Theater's Festival of New American Plays. Now LaChiusa is collaborating with director Harold Prince on The Petrified Prince, based on an unproduced Ingmar Bergman screenplay.
Time will tell, but it is clear that an unusual new talent is being revealed, note by note, like a musical composition. Ira Weitzman, director of musical theatre at Lincoln Center, says LaChiusa has "an unbelievable natural gift," and that he is a "natural theatre writer with tremendous, quirky insights into human emotions and relationships."
Success is so new to LaChiusa that, in an interview, he has no easy answers, the kind that come from having explained his work often. Nor is he adept at articulating his creative intent or his working process. He is better at simply putting his words to music. Nonetheless, LaChiusa is aware that he is at a turning point. "There is no turning back now," he says more than once. "The best adventure is one you haven't taken yet," he adds, echoing the restless characters in Hello Again. If music doesn't lie, then what truths can be found in the 31-year-old LaChiusa's music and lyrics? That love is elusive, and that men and women are doomed in their search...