See What I Wanna See - World Premiere Recording

One can appreciate what composer Michael John LaChiusa is trying to do; one can even admire it. Although he can write perfectly good musical-comedy material, as, for instance, in First Lady Suite, he is after something different and daring, the fusing of musical comedy and opera into music drama.

Marie Christine was an updated Medea; Hello Again variations on Schnitzler's Reigen; See What I Wanna See, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2005 and is now available on CD from Ghostlight Records, a retelling of Ryonosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon and other stories. The fusing of East and West-the twain that according to Kipling never shall meet-may be a bit puzzling to those who have not seen the show, but is worth meeting halfway.

Each of the musical's two acts is prefaced by a brief Japanese story. In the first, a married woman stabs her lover to death during a last coupling; in the second, a lover postcoitally strangles his mistress. In these, the music is very Oriental-sounding.

After that, we get a triangle involving a rich husband, his variety-artist young wife, and a thief who has sex with the woman and may be the cause of the man's death. There is also the janitor of the New York cinema where Rashomon, the film, is playing, and who, on his nocturnal return home through Central Park, stumbles on the husband's body.

[IMG:L]This somehow leads to another Central Park story, about a priest who has lost his faith and his atheistic aunt who eventually regains it. To make a mock of religion, the priest posts notices in the park heralding Christ's second coming, rising from the lake at a specific time.

We are shown how this affects a failed young actress, a CPA who has become a hermit in the park, the media and the populace. And finally the priest and his aunt.

Though somewhat convoluted, the schema allows for some affecting songs, well orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin and exemplarily delivered by Marc Kudisch, Aaron Lohr, Idina Menzel, Henry Stram and Mary Testa. How to describe this music in simple terms?

It involves daring leaps across an exotic soundscape, with pulsating rhythms, disturbing discords, jangling asperities and cunningly foiled melodic expectations. But a searching imagination is manifestly at work, and our feelings are sneaked up on through unaccustomed strategies and often enough engaged.

This is not a CD for everybody. But if you are curious about what may well be the future of the American musical at the hands of LaChiusa, Adam Guettel and a few others, this may open a window well worth looking through.

You can read John Simon on Theatre every weekend at www.bloomberg.com