Word: arts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...come from an art background," he says, "but I've had experience doing mechanical types of things before...
...Brion's album Meaningless could have been one of 1999's best solo debuts--but you may never get to hear it. Lava/Atlantic, Brion's label, decided the CD wasn't sufficiently marketable and never released it. "I was treated as if I had handed in my 'art record,' as if I had intentionally done some horribly self-destructive thing," says Brion. "I thought I handed in something that was reasonably commercial...
...will take the American musical into the new millennium? Two very different camps are vying to lay out the future path for this very 20th century art form. On one side are the rockers, who want to give the musical a fresh beat and a more contemporary, populist appeal. But Rent hasn't exactly spawned a revolution, and rock on Broadway right now consists of little more than 20-year-old Bee Gees songs. On the other side are the artistes, a group of theatrical composers who use Stephen Sondheim as a model, care little about tunes that send...
Enter Marie Christine, probably the most highly anticipated of this new art-musical genre. Lyrics and music are by Michael John LaChiusa, one of the most acclaimed of the post-Sondheim composers. It has a story of thematic heft and historical color: a retelling of the Medea myth, set in the Creole society of New Orleans in the 1890s. It stars Audra McDonald, the three-time Tony Award winner who showcased the music of LaChiusa and other art composers on her CD Way Back to Paradise. And it has received an extraordinary buildup from the New York Times, the Only...
...musical, which opened last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, makes a good case for the art-song approach but something less than a good musical. McDonald emotes powerfully and sings beautifully as the title character, the voodoo-practicing daughter in a family of mixed-race Creoles, who sets the tragedy in motion when she becomes the lover of a white ship captain and bears him two children. The racial theme--"I was a servant in my father's house," says Marie's brother, describing their white father's rejection of them--is provocative without pontification. And there are fluid...