Matter of Opinion: John Simon on See What I Wanna See and Second Act Trouble

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.

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.

Second Act Trouble: Behind the Scenes at Broadway's Big Musical Bombs
By Steven Suskin
Applause Books
Now Available

Like unhappy families, all musical comedy failures are different. Their genesis and demise are fascinating to read about: funny, sad, scary, and horribly human. Steven Suskin's book Second Act Trouble chronicles the life stories of 25 of them, one more interesting than the other. And not only to show queens, but also to anyone concerned with theater—all that behind-the-scenes stuff that reveals how the best-laid plans of mice and men can be swept into oblivion like so many mouse droppings.

Putting a musical on Broadway is both a very expensive and a very complex matter. Because it must recoup a usually imposing investment, it must please the great unwashed; but because no creators propose to peddle deliberate piffle rather than a work of artistic quality, it also has to satisfy the discerning connoisseurs and critics. Although it must aim both downward and upward, a house so divided against itself may not be the best recipe for filling houses.

A show may have been hopeless to begin with, but purblindly considered viable by some: authors, producers, angels, friends. Or a show may have a strong first act, but irredeemable second. Or it may suffer from so many makers' contradictory intentions that, in the course of profuse rewriting, recasting, redirecting or rechoreographing, it simply disintegrates.

In the older days of out-of-town tryouts, it may have received the wrong signals from what we like to believe are less discerning audiences and less expert critics; nowadays, during long New York previews, playing to, alas, no more enlightened audiences, it may generate a four-letter-word-of-mouth response. And much as we dislike to believe it, our own critics may prove imperceptive, leading to undeserved failures, e.g., Mack and Mabel.

Or a show may be underfinanced, or a producer of little faith may give up on it. Or something totally unpredictable may go wrong think Kwamina, when an author-director may find his spouse and star in bed with the black leading man. But stars can produce a large variety of problems.

They can be out of control and unmanageable, as Jerry Lewis was in a new version of Helzapoppin. Or they may be more than willing, but, like Liv Ullmann in I Remember Mama, not good at singing. Or sundry cases movie or TV actors who are strangers to the stage.

Or it may be a mere lack of stars, as when Hallelujah, Baby, written for Lena Horne, had to make do with the less-known Leslie Uggams, who, ironically, proceeded to stardom.

And then there is that most melancholy cause for failure of a show with excellent pedigree, but whose creators, well past their prime, have become horses of a different color: old gray mares. Of this human as well as theatrical problem, Second Act Trouble provides ample examples.

Suskin's method is impeccable. A smart anthologist, he reprints the best possible contemporary eyewitness accounts, which he interlards, in different typeface and color, with his own post-mortem supplementary insights. These, whether of historical, critical, or merely gossip value, are always pertinent and sometimes deliciously impertinent. Suskin also supplies appetite-inducing prefatory notes and concluding observations, listing the number of performances, excerpts from reviews and whatever else you might wish to know.

Of course, everyone may have a favorite loser that did not make it into the book; mine happens to be Mata Hari, which managed to fail also off-Broadway, revised as Ballad for a Firing Squad. But never mind; there is plenty here to chew on and savor.

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