Ben Brantley, The New York Times:
Eleanor Roosevelt warbles a Wagnerian love duet with her pal Lorena Hickok. Mamie Eisenhower serenades herself in the style of a Broadway showstopper. Jackie Kennedy uses the art song to ponder the immortality of her pink pillbox hat. With moments like these, Michael John LaChiusa’s First Lady Suite trailed the purple fragrance of high camp when it opened at the Public Theater in 1993. Here, undoubtedly, was a show destined to become at least a minor cult classic.
But as the powerfully sung revival at the Connelly Theater makes clear, this whimsical chamber musical has always been more than a hoot. Though it makes unabashed use of the easy iconography of fame, First Lady Suite never coasts on the flashbulb-lighted surfaces of its subjects. That Mr. LaChiusa sees those glossy surfaces as something like prison walls keeps his show from turning into the musical equivalent of an Andy Warhol portrait.
With a new theme-enhancing prologue and epilogue, this production by the Transport Group, directed by Jack Cummings III, emphasizes that Jackie, Mamie and Eleanor - and by extension their female friends and assistants - are women behind bars, doing time in the White House. And as interpreted by a radiant cast that includes Broadway veterans like Mary Testa and Mary Beth Peil, Mr. LaChiusa’s music aches with the yearning of caged songbirds.
First Lady Suite was the show that signaled that Mr. LaChiusa was a young composer to watch, among the brightest of the cerebral songwriters of the post-Sondheim era. Since then his Marie Christine and Wild Party have been produced on Broadway, where his roving, intricate and often somber melodies failed to find great favor among audiences who prefer tunes more easily whistled.
Still, he has ardent partisans. And this version of First Lady Suite, which runs through April 17, helps you understand why. It also explains the presence of established performers like Ms. Peil, Ms. Testa, Sherry D. Boone and Julia Murney in a small East Village theater in a show whose tickets cost $15.
The complexly shaped songs of Suite allow these women to exercise their vocal chops in ways that more conventional fare seldom does. Singers most often asked to belt or simply sound pretty can here demonstrate their considerable skills, pursuing wayward rhythms and unexpected key changes, while also hitting emotional notes they are rarely asked to take on.
The show is made up of four vignettes. The first takes place on Air Force One on Nov. 22, 1963, and is centered on a reverie in which Mary Gallagher (played with appealing uneasiness by Donna Lynne Champlin), a White House secretary, is visited by her employer, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Robyn Hussa). In the second a fed-up Mamie Eisenhower (Cheryl Stern) floats through time on her birthday with the opera singer Marian Anderson (Ms. Boone).
After a palate cleanser of a blackout sketch - Margaret Truman (Ruth Gottschall) performs a fraught song recital overseen by her domineering mother, Bess (James Hindman, who also plays Dwight Eisenhower) - the show segues into its most completely realized segment. Set on a small plane piloted by Amelia Earhart (Ms. Murney), it explores the relationship of two of the passengers, Eleanor Roosevelt (Ms. Peil) and her companion, the journalist Lorena Hickok (Ms. Testa).
Mr. LaChiusa ingeniously uses song to convey a sense of entrapment - of women paradoxically frozen in motion on speeding planes and trains - with repeated, slightly varied phrases that suggest chafing in confinement. “Smile and wave and wave and smile and smile and wave,” sings Jackie, in a prophetic vision of the Dallas motorcade that takes her husband to his death.
“Where’s Mamie?” asks Mamie Eisenhower again and again, drifting from brassy perkiness into existential uncertainty. And Hickok, wondering how she sacrificed a hot career in newspapers to be a First Lady’s lap dog, answers her own question with sad, exquisite variations on the phrase “when Eleanor smiles at me.”
John Story’s Pop-flavored setting, with its Warholesque panels of repeated photographic images of the first ladies in question, brings out the frivolity in a work that is not, at heart, frivolous. But no one can deny the intensity of focus and haunted vocal shadings provided by the show’s nine actresses (and one actor, Mr. Hindman).
As an alternately blithe and bitter Mamie, Ms. Stern summons illuminating connections between her character and that of another female role model of the 1950’s, the heroine of I Love Lucy. Ms. Boone’s ravishing voice more than does justice to the gospel-inflected arias sung by her Marian Anderson. Ms. Testa shakes the walls with her majestically thwarted Hickok, while Ms. Peil (late of Nine) sweetly and wittily channels that lady-like force of will that was Eleanor Roosevelt.
The show uses what at first seems like camp - an attitude that heightens the superficial - to achieve unexpected emotional depth. Flippant female impersonation is obviously not what’s called for here. When the nine women of the ensemble join their voices in the epilogue, the sound becomes a transcendent hymn to feminine power. It is a stirring, blessed release in a show that has hitherto been defined by the longing for escape.
John Simon, New York Magazine:
The revival of Michael John LaChiusa’s 1993 First Lady Suite by the Transport Group is, to quote Flanders and Swann, a transport of delight. Musically fascinating and verbally irreverent, it jauntily weaves fact and fiction about Jackie Kennedy (and Lady Bird Johnson), Mamie Eisenhower (and Marian Anderson), Bess (and Margaret) Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt (and Amelia Earhart), into charmingly piquant, surreal fantasies.
LaChiusa’s music is subtle and tricky, making demands on both singers and spectators. Aptly scored for two pianos and cello, it insidiously wins you over as it ranges from near-operatic to jazzy, from cajoling to caustic, and, like the madcap lyrics, takes fanciful flight. All ten performers are impeccable as both singers and actors, but I especially liked Donna Lynne Champlin as Jackie’s weary secretary, Cheryl Stern and Sherry D. Boone as the aerodynamic duo of Mamie and Marian, and Mary Beth Peil, Mary Testa, and Julia Murney in the ticklish threesome of Eleanor, Hick, and Amelia. Jack Cummings III has staged with commendable simplicity, and the visuals, though spare, do not disappoint. Remarkably, there is no electronic amplification, a rare blessing nowadays, amply justified by the fresh voices and fine acoustics.
Linda Winer, Newsday:
When First Lady Suite had its beguiling premiere at George C. Wolfe’s new Public Theater in 1993, we knew Michael John LaChiusa was a name we’d have to learn to spell.
How satisfying to get a second look at a debut piece that holds a tantalizing place in the young history of the post-Sondheim modern musical. The enterprising Transport Group has attracted a formidable cast - nine women and one utility man - to the Connelly Theatre in the East Village, where tickets are $15.
LaChiusa’s musical identity is original, the ideas are fresh and the humor, droll and delightfully odd. There are suggestions of Sondheim in the chatty bursts of staccato, especially in the strongest piece, “Over Texas,” set on Air Force One on Nov. 22, 1963. With just two pianos and a cello, these rhythm-driven melodies with idiosyncratic phrases have a startling range of colors.
Jack Cummings III has directed the four musicals on a raked presidential seal (designed by John Story) with First Lady faces repeated on panels suggestive of Andy Warhol iconography. Kathryn Rohe’s costumes are chosen with just the right pillbox hat for Jackie, the strangely apt pinkish bathrobe for Mamie.
LaChiusa may be too young for a full-blown retrospective, but it is time to see Hello Again again.
