Мари Кристин: Мюзикл о любви и мести в Новом Орлеане

Musical

Marie Christine is a musical with music, lyrics, and book by Michael John LaChiusa. It opened on Broadway in 1999. Set in 1890s New Orleans and then 5 years later in Chicago; the story is loosely based on the Greek play Medea, and uses elements of voodoo rituals and practices. The title character was based in part on the historical figure of Marie Laveau – specifically, her daughter, who took the same name – and the myths surrounding them.

Following the success of Michael John LaChiusa's 1993 musical Hello Again, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theater directed by Graciela Daniele, LaChiusa and Daniele decided to develop a new musical work based on a classic text for Audra McDonald. McDonald won her first Tony Award in the acclaimed 1994 Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, produced by Lincoln Center Theater. The musical was workshopped a handful of times through 1996 and in development for three and a half years before its initial staging. Marie Christine followed Parade at the Vivian Beaumont another large, new musical created at LCT and written by a young composer, Jason Robert Brown. Both works shared similar themes and stories of racism, misogyny, and redemption in the American South.

One of the last new musicals to open in the 20th century, it opened on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater of Lincoln Center Theater on December 2, 1999 in a limited run and closed on January 9, 2000 after 42 performances and 39 previews. Directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, it starred Audra McDonald as Marie Christine, Anthony Crivello as Dante Keyes, Vivian Reed as Marie Christine's voodoo priestess mother, and Mary Testa as Magdalena. While billed initially as a limited run by Lincoln Center Theater, any chance of further extension of the production was severed with the theater's announcement that the musical "dance play" Contact would transfer to the Beaumont from the smaller, Off Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in March 2000. Contact would go on to play 1,010 performances and win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2000. The production was nominated for several Tony Awards, including Best Book of a Musical (LaChiusa), Best Score (LaChiusa), and Best Leading Actress in a Musical (McDonald). An original Broadway cast album was released by RCA Victor following the show's closing. Columbia Stages presented the first New York City revival of the piece, opening on March 6, 2013 through March 9 and was staged in a raw space at 3LD Technology and Art Center directed by Raymond Zilberberg.

The production received mixed reviews. Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times: "When Audra McDonald sings her first notes as the Medea like heroine of Marie Christine, Michael John LaChiusa's solemn, sometimes somnolent musical tragedy at Lincoln Center, there is clearly sorcery at work Marie Christine is a resounding confirmation of Ms. McDonald's status as a vocal artist of singular skills and sensibility As a musical portrait of an individual, Marie Christine is stunning; as a compelling, complete production, it still feels oddly unfinished. Despite ravishing orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick, the score rarely achieves much momentum or intensity on its own, and its recurrent motifs don't haunt the imagination as they should." Michael Feingold, reviewing for the Village Voice, wrote: "Proficient, skilled, and imaginative, LaChiusa marshals an enormous panoply of approaches to tell his tale, but it doesn't hold together, even with the towering talent of Audra McDonald at its center, because the myth won't supply what he needs from it; his constantly shifting strategies only diffuse it further. Though LaChiusa's blurry conception is often conveyed in equally blurry lyrics, his music, with its constant restless invention, probably deserves a fairer hearing than it gets here. More than any new score I've heard recently, it wants unplugging."