Little Fish

Michael John LaChiusa is a strange kind of lyricist-composer, and often book-writer, of musicals. His lyrics, as in Little Fish, flirt with banality; his music flirts with absence of melody. It's rhythm above all, but also idiosyncratic instrumentation, bizarre harmony, peculiar sounds. Not like anybody else, this Michael LaChiusa.

Ghostlight Records has come out with the cast album of a West Coast production of Little Fish by The Blank Theatre Company. The piece is "suggested by short stories by Deborah Eisenberg," an interesting writer, but not necessarily provider of material for musicals, however loosely based on it.

This is a musical about the difficulties of giving up smoking, and about taking up swimming and taking up running. About men who mostly misunderstand and maltreat women, and women who suffer from them and from themselves. Love, if it exists at all, doesn't seem to work—not even between men and men. What does work is friendship, rarely between men and women, mostly between women and women. It is also about elevating trivia to matters of importance.

Eccentric stuff for a musical, but not for a peculiar musical. The claim LaChiusa can safely make is for some sort of originality. But as I wrote in my review of his Hello Again (1993), "Our sensation-hungry age mistakes difference for originality. Squiggles are different from circles and triangles, but whereas the latter are geometry, the former are nothing."

Yet this is not to say that LaChiusa is without talent. For one thing, he is a very charming person—a talent for making friendships, if not for writing musicals about them. For another, he has written book, words and music for First Lady Suite (1993), which I like a lot. In See What I Wanna See (2005), there are some noteworthy things among other that are less so. He seeks out worthy sources—Lorca, Garcia Marquéz, Schnitzler, Kurosawa—though what he does with and to them is another matter.

[IMG:R]But back to Little Fish, a CD release performance for which I recently attended at Joe's Pub. Some of those in the revival and on the disc were performing, along with some newcomers. Of the former, I enjoyed Alice Ripley, Gregory Jbara and Dina Morishita; of the latter, Gavin Creel, Judy Kuhn, Norm Lewis, Julia Murney, Kate Shindle, and could put up with some others, though not Lea DeLaria.

As for the CD with its 22 songs, it fascinates and bothers me, the latter quite a bit more. It is not till the tenth track, "Cigarette Dream," that I find a real tune, and then not another till number 14, "By the Way." On the recording, no one is credited with the book, though LaChiusa was listed as librettist during the show's 2003 off-Broadway production. (I take "words" in "words and music" to refer to lyrics.) Still, in a random, jumpy fashion, things do happen. Interestingly, as I read the synopsis in the grammatically and orthographically somewhat subliterate booklet, nothing in the plot rang a bell, even though I saw and reviewed the original production.

It occurs to me that LaChiusa is also good at pastiche, as in some numbers of The Wild Party (2000) and some of his early, off-off-Broadway stuff. He is surely at his worst when he is trying to be operatic, as in Marie Christine and Bernarda Alba. But I am certain the Little Fish CD will find its fans, helped as it also is by Bruce Coughlin's orchestrations and fine performances. Alice Ripley alone, as Charlotte, the floundering heroine, is worth the price of purchase and a good deal more.

LaChiusa, I am happy to say, is a generous fellow; he may even forgive this review.