We called Michael John LaChiusa recently to find out how the premiere of his opera Lovers and Friends (Chautauqua Variations) had gone and to ask how his experience with Lyric Opera of Chicago Center for American Artists had been. "We had a great time! We rehearsed a month and a half or so. The dress rehearsal was a dream - it was terrible! I love a really bad dress. But the two performances were wonderful. It was a great production; it turned out very, very beautiful in so many ways. Audiences liked it, critics liked it.

Melina Pyron, Christopher Dickerson and Robert Orth in Lovers and Friends. All photos by Dan Rest, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago.

"The entire cast was remarkable. Stacey Tappan [as Iris, the pregnant daughter of U.S. poet laureate Babbitt Cross] emerged as a real star - her performance was breathtaking. A lot of them were young, but they were hard-working and they really pulled it all out. It was impressive to see what they came up with. They were so ready and able to deal with the rewrites; the adaptability factor was wonderful, which is a rare commodity in making a new work. It was a luxury to have a cast willing to go along with the changes."

What about those changes? "I would say that about 70% of the original score remained the same, the rest got rewritten. Sometimes during rehearsals and tryouts for a new musical it's a lot more than that. Once the whole piece was laid out in front of us, we could see the ups and the downs of the score. Some arias worked and others didn't; some things were extraneous. I was always trying to flesh out the characters more and clarify the thematic points; and to move from one beat to the next faster. If I thought a character should say something different at a certain point, or if I thought there was too much repetition, I would write a new aria overnight. Brad Vieth, the musical director, helped with the orchestration. So there were cuts, edits, trimmings, everything that goes into making a compact, dramatic evening. If I could, I would love to keep looking at the fourth act and trim it a bit. There is still work to do - it never ends. [He laughs.]

"I wasn't sure how the audience would respond to the story. Usually, peoples' expectations of opera are a lot different from my own. This was a very modern and personal story. I was really experimenting with this piece, to see how far could I go 'Chekovian'-wise in terms of characters and thematic material. There was a lot of ambiguity in terms of character and playing with time and space., and the audience was right there with us. It made me very happy to know they could follow it and feel something. That was delightful."

Michael Sommese and Hollis Resnick in Lovers and Friends.

Will we see it again? "We'll keep our fingers crossed. You know the story with new operas - everyone wants a premiere. I would like to see it done in a more of a chamber atmosphere, although I don't know necessarily what that means. It's large enough to work in any kind of space, but it is written for a small cast and an orchestra of 17 players. There is an intimacy about the work that is conducive to a smaller space, although the theater we were in would be considered a large house by Broadway standards."

How are you doing now that it's over? "You know, I think my outlook is pretty much the same - it's basically healthy. It is fabulous that there are places where you can do your work and have a great time and have it done beautifully. That was one of the joys of the experience - to work with a company like Chicago Lyric - to have so much talent available to me. It was a real challenge for me, and the place and the piece and the talent I was working with demanded I rise to it. This was definitely harder than anything I have done before, and the joy of succeeding was something that was gratefully needed. Whatever bitterness I had about last season on Broadway is diminished, because you have to live in the moment. Every challenge has to be harder than the last one.

"I learned an awful lot about the mechanics of how an opera is put together. I had been through it before as a librettist but not as a composer and, in this case, librettist too. Years ago, when I was working with [composer] Robert Moran, he told me that a piece only gets up on the sheer willpower of its composer. And it's true. You have to act as football coach, participant and cheerleader. You can't sit on the sidelines - you have to be actively involved in getting the show up and working. The composer is involved in every detail - is the theater right, do the sets and costumes work, is the stage direction telling the story the way you want it told, how should the orchestra pit be arranged? In musical theater, most of that is taken out of your hands because everything is so compartmentalized. I didn't have to move the sets myself, but I was damned willing to do so a few times.

"The work myself and some of my colleagues are doing now is not being accepted on Broadway, which is fundamentally wrong. Broadway should be a place that accepts difficult and original work. It should a place that offers the very best musical theater, the best of American culture; it shouldn't be just a money machine. What Chicago Lyric did was make a place for people like myself and Ricky Ian to work, which is the right step to take. To have them say, 'come here,' was a very brave thing for a cultural institution that is very traditional in many respects. They are saying that there should be no lines drawn between opera and musical theater, that there is no subject matter unworthy of musicalization. They are exploring questions of venue: what should be done in an opera house and what should be done in a smaller theater? What are the rights and wrongs of all that? I joked with them that I was a barbarian let in the gate, and they were very accommodating. [He laughs.]

"Culturally, we are a very young country. The fruition of that in terms of art is that we are still grounded in the western European culture. So, there are still delineations between opera, which is a European invention, and American musical theater. We are still finding our own sense of what is American art and what is American music. We have some signposts, jazz for instance, as well as the assimilation of other cultural influences. I think we are always going to be a melting pot in music, just as we are culturally. The important thing is to make your own place in this world.

What are you working on now? "I always have five plates twirling in the air. One crashes and I still have four more to deal with. I'm working on a couple of new musicals. One is going to happen in Tokyo at the end of the year. It is based on The Nutcracker - a modern version. It's my first foray into making pieces for younger audiences. There is not much difference really, except that you have to have a lot more energy. I'm very excited about it."

See also the USOperaWeb June 2001 feature on Michael LaChiusa and Lovers and Friends (Chautauqua Variations)