Second Chances

Second Chances / An artist's musical journey through illness

By Allan Wallach. Allan Wallach, a former theater critic for Newsday, is a freelance writer. (6/16/98)

        `A New Brain is surely unique. Never before, it's safe to say, has there been a musical that dealt with brain surgery while taking detours to such unrelated matters as sailing, genetics and writing children's songs.
        The virtually all-sung show, which opens Thursday at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, is based on the experiences of William Finn, who wrote the music and lyrics and, with James Lapine, the book.
        "One week after winning some Tony Awards in 1992 for `Falsettos,' my first Broadway show," Finn explains in a program note, "I ended up in the hospital with what one doctor told me was an inoperable brain tumor." The musical, he adds, is "an attempt to re-create what it was like when I thought I was going to die, and didn't."
        It fell to Graciela Daniele, the director and choreographer, to put this unlikely material on the stage. It's the latest challenge in a career that has zigzagged through such disparate musicals as "The Pirates of Penzance," "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," "Once on This Island," "Zorba," "The Rink," "The Goodbye Girl," "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" and, in this just-ended season, "Ragtime."
        With "A New Brain," she said recently at Lincoln Center, "the challenge mostly is not the theme. It's the fact that the piece is very impressionistic. It is not a conventional musical with a plot and a book and numbers. It's like a cycle of songs, with a very strong thematic line and a slight plot. But through the songs one has to tell the story and the impressions of these characters.
        "It took me a while - it took all of us a while - to understand that the piece is not necessarily about an illness or its events. It is mostly about a journey toward wisdom - an artist's resurrection. An understanding of what life really is for an artist, which is his work."
        To say the least, this sounds too somber to sing about. Somehow, though, Daniele and her collaborators have given the hospital stay of a children's TV-show songwriter named Gordon (played by Malcolm Gets) a vitamin injection of spirited playfulness.
        Daniele doesn't take credit for the light tone and quirky touches. The wit, she says, was Finn's, who is "fine now, as crazy as ever, but a good kind of crazy - crazy inventive." And she praises the "extraordinary" cast - playing, among others, Gordon's mother (Penny Fuller), his friend (Liz Larsen), his frog-costumed kiddy-show star (Chip Zien) and his sailing-obsessed lover (Christopher Innvar) - for suggestions that added to "the zaniness of the situation." One innovative idea, she says, was scenic designer David Gallo's; he placed a tiny camera inside an MRI cylinder so its occupant - Gordon - could be seen on a screen as he joins in a song.
        "That's what makes the theater so interesting to me, that it's not what one person thinks about," says Daniele, a vivacious woman of 58 with a radiant smile and a lilting Hispanic accent. "And I think that's what a director does. A good director has the eyes very open and the ears very open, and looks at everything and picks up the right element, hopefully, to serve the play."
        "A New Brain" is very much in keeping with Daniele's tastes. "I was formed in a culture that is more European," she says, "so I like offbeat, small musicals more than big events."
        Daniele's formative years were taken up with dancing in her native Argentina and later throughout Europe. Inspired by seeing Jerome Robbins' dances in a Paris production of "West Side Story," she came to the United States to study. Her eye-catching dancing in Broadway musicals led choreographer Michael Bennett to choose her as his assistant and Bob Fosse as his dance captain. With Bennett's encouragement, she stepped up to the next rung: choreography.
        Moving on to directing was "a natural progression," she points out. "Some of the most extraordinary directors have been choreographers." Following Agnes de Mille's breakthrough direction of "Allegro" in 1947, she says, came such notables as Bennett, Fosse, Gower Champion, Tommy Tune and the man she calls "Mr. Robbins, the dean of them all."
        She joined that great tradition, Daniele says, "because I wanted to become a director." So when Max Ferra, artistic director of the Hispanic theater company INTAR, asked her to develop and direct a work of her own choosing, "a whole incredible window opened in my work, which was to work with something I cared about." The show was the 1987 "Tango Apasionado."
        Since then she has received 10 Tony nominations. But even before the June 7 Tony Awards she observed with a laugh, "I guess it's my luck never to win it."
        By now she has moved beyond the theater proscenium. Woody Allen tapped her to choreograph three movies: "Bullets Over Broadway," "Mighty Aphrodite" and "Everyone Says I Love You."
        Still, the Lincoln Center Theater, where she is a resident director, is the workplace she says is "like having a home." It enables her to spend time developing a piece, like the one she's working on now: a planned 1999 musical, "Marie Christine," an adaptation of "Medea" with words and music by Michael John LaChiusa, her teammate on 1994's "Hello Again."
        "I feel as a director - as a choreographer, too, but specifically as a director - that my main work is to nurture the artists that I have surrounded myself with," Daniele says. "And so the first job is to really get those artists to be sensitive enough to make that family. It becomes a family; we work for a short time, but very intensely. We collaborate and we tell each other things and we go through arguments and deep emotions."
        Daniele, who is married to lighting designer Jules Fisher, says her passion away from the theater is gardening. "Sometimes, as a director," she says, "I feel very much like a gardener. It's put in the seeds and then nurture them."

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