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Playbill, January 2000

Steam Heat
That's what's generated by Anthony Crivello and Audra McDonald in the provocative new musical, Marie Christine
by Harry Haun

For the discerning eye, it's all there in the Marie Christine ad -- which in itself is an extension of the combustible marquee-mating of Audra McDonald and Anthony Crivello. She's staring at the camera with a haunted, hunted desperation -- her fingers digging in his flesh -- while he hovers over her protectively, eyes blissfully downcast.
        He is her man, but he done her wrong, as they say in New Orleans -- and New Orleans is where Michael John LaChiusa begins his musical retelling of Medea. His is a tale of two cities -- N'Orleans and Chicago, circa the turn of the century -- and of two sensibilities, as represented by the Tony winners in the leads going through the motions and emotions of a tale Euripides put to paper in 438 B.C. Still, love in its most lethal form is never out of date -- the dailies are full of dire Medea deeds -- tragically topical after two dozen centuries.
        But the dark depths of such passion usually elude the lens of a camera. In this particular instance, the image was doubly directed -- a calculatedly collaborative effort by Douglas Kirkland, who took the picture for the ad, and by Graciela Daniele, who's directing and choreographing the piece, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont.
        "The essence of our show is in that poster," contends Crivello, "she clutching into the fibers of his body -- and he torn between the anguish of wanting to be a free spirit and wanting her." For anyone who has been down this road before, it makes for a rough ride.
        Marie Christine and her Jason -- here, Dante Samuel Keyes -- may be the most magnificently mismatched couple since the Euripides originals, but they are not carbon copies. "It's not Medea," Crivello cautions. "It uses Medea as the springboard, but mixed into it is New Orleans/Chicago of 1895 as well as her African roots. She has a white plantation Christian father and a black Creole mother and is -- like my character, Dante -- a freewheeling spirit who's always seeking the unconventional. And we meet."
        The psychic damage has been done before this meeting. "We don't know this at the time -- we come to find this out in the text -- he was raised in a whorehouse. That sort of thing gives you a certain slant on women -- that and the absence of a father figure -- and he grows up a wanderer, sailing up and down the Mississippi, eventually becoming a boat captain. The imagery of them coming together is that of putting fire to water. You get steam."
        Appropriate for the steamy team, LaChiusa has come up with a passionate score -- and, yes, it is hard to sing, says Crivello. "Rhythmically, he's very technical. As I said to Graci, when I first heard the score, it reminded my of Aaron Copland. It has that kind of flow and sweep. You wonder, 'Where is this going?' -- but it keeps moving forward. There isn't a set melodic track that you fall into. There just isn't."
        This is not the first time Crivello has brought a musical muscularity to Broadway. Hal Prince tapped him to be a Che replacement in Evita and was impressed enough to hire him to originate the role of Valentine, the revolutionary firebrand in Kiss of the Spider Woman -- a part he played to the Tony-winning hilt. Aside from the testosterone level, the other roles are unrelated to his present assignment. "Dante's a dreamer. Valentine had a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong -- without compromise -- and when he was confronted with having to share a cell with a homosexual, he took it for what it was: a very particular and deliberate insult, designed to break him down."
        Crivello's post-Tony life has been spent mostly on the West Coast doing movies, television and screenplays. But he did put in six-and-a-half years trying to get back to Broadway, as the brooding Rochester of Jane Eyre, which premiered in Canada.
        "It's funny how things happen, and you wonder why at times. I played the role in Canada, got great reviews, was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award, did the cast album -- and then it went away. I don't really know why that happened, either. I don't wish anybody ill. That's not the way I work. My approach is to see the door that is open."
        Let the record show that Crivello reached down and turned the knob of this current door. "I happened to come across it and just see it in breakdowns -- Marie Christine, Graciela Daniele, Audra McDonald, Michael John LaChiusa, Lincoln Center -- that's a great combination. I thought, 'I'd love to be a part of that.'
        "Bernie Gersten [Executive Producer of Lincoln Theatre Center] had said to me at the end of Spider Woman, 'If you ever want to work at Lincoln Center, you let us know,' so I told my agent this and said I think it's time to let them know. Bernie's very much a man of his word, and that door opened up, and I went through. It wound up being just as simple as that."
 
 

The strangest thing about Audra McDonald's starring role in Michael John LaChiusa's new Broadway musical, Marie Christine, is that it's her first. Given the attention that's been heaped upon her in the past few years, it's easy to forget that her theatre reputation has been completely built on supporting parts (albeit award-winning ones in hit productions, each and every one of them).
        McDonald's co-stars could hardly have asked for better support. From her first entrance in Nicholas Hytner's rethought Carousel, the breadth of her talent has been a bit unsettling. Her zeal in performance is perhaps an aspect of her youth (she is not yet 30 even now). The discipline and maturity of her work and her strength of personality, however, are positively preternatural.
        That engaging personality, when one thinks of it, is a relatively simple one. She comes off as sweet, almost wholesome, yet perhaps with a knowledge that that sweetness won't necessarily get her what she wants. For that, she has in reserve a robust heart and will, prepared to take on all challenges, from marriage (Carousel) to an unjust society (Ragtime) to (in her bravest showing) Maria Callas (Master Class).
        LaChiusa wrote Marie Christine specifically for McDonald, and no one ought question he hired the right woman. On her debut album, Way Back to Paradise, McDonald gave herself over to music by LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown and others feeding the ever-widening stream of new theatre music. No one before had managed to bring these composers' often difficult work fully to life. McDonald infused the songs with a fierce intelligence the compositions always possessed, but also with a throbbing emotion they often seemed to lack.
        Vibrant, fresh and very much modern, McDonald is nonetheless something of a throwback to bygone days, when larger-than-life stars such as herself strode the city's stages. There is nothing small about her, nothing less than vivid. Even standing still, she radiates life, an almost visible energy field tracing her strapping figure. When she adds the shimmering voice, she charges the air, and the audience is enveloped in her atmosphere. I realize that, put in such terms, it all seems almost superhuman. But in performance, that is simply not the case, and there lies the secret force of her talent. Hers is that rare and raw theatricality that is somehow never unnatural.