Medea in New Orleans

By Richard Zoglin

Who will take the American musical into the new millennium? Two very different camps are vying to lay out the future path for this very 20th century art form. On one side are the rockers, who want to give the musical a fresh beat and a more contemporary, populist appeal. But Rent hasn't exactly spawned a revolution, and rock on Broadway right now consists of little more than 20-year-old Bee Gees songs. On the other side are the artistes, a group of theatrical composers who use Stephen Sondheim as a model, care little about tunes that send you out of the theater humming, and seek a new amalgam of Broadway musical and traditional opera.

Enter Marie Christine, probably the most highly anticipated of this new art-musical genre. Lyrics and music are by Michael John LaChiusa, one of the most acclaimed of the post-Sondheim composers. It has a story of thematic heft and historical color: a retelling of the Medea myth, set in the Creole society of New Orleans in the 1890s. It stars Audra McDonald, the three-time Tony Award winner who showcased the music of LaChiusa and other art composers on her CD Way Back to Paradise. And it has received an extraordinary buildup from the New York Times, the Only Newspaper That Matters for serious theater, which ran no fewer than three major stories on the show while it was in previews.

The musical, which opened last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, makes a good case for the art-song approach but something less than a good musical. McDonald emotes powerfully and sings beautifully as the title character, the voodoo-practicing daughter in a family of mixed-race Creoles, who sets the tragedy in motion when she becomes the lover of a white ship captain and bears him two children. The racial theme--"I was a servant in my father's house," says Marie's brother, describing their white father's rejection of them--is provocative without pontification. And there are fluid and poetic bits of staging, as when Marie casts a voodoo spell on her maid, snipping a ribbon as the girl's limbs collapse, one by one.

But the show works better as an intellectual exercise than a moving theatrical experience. Director Graciela Daniele's rather dry production dwells in ponderous shadows for much of the first act and shifts abruptly (and half-heartedly) to Gay Nineties Chicago in the second. The transformation of Marie's lover (Anthony Crivello, solid if a bit too modern) from itinerant seaman to rising machine politician is not adequately explained--nor is the matter of why an ambitious candidate in 1890s Chicago would find it advantageous to claim two mixed-race kids as his own. Most crucial, LaChiusa's multihued, melodically challenging music is more effective in evoking folkloric tradition than in helping us scale the cathartic heights this operatic show is aiming for. Amplified guitars, anyone?

--R.Z.