Michael John LaChiusa

Michael John LaChiusa, born July 24, 1962, in Chautauqua, New York, is an American composer, lyricist, and librettist working in musical theatre and opera. The eldest of three boys in a Roman Catholic family of Italian descent, LaChiusa taught himself piano at age seven and received little formal music training. His early musical influences included contemporary American composers John Corigliano, John Adams, and Philip Glass, alongside musical theatre figures George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Stephen Sondheim. After graduating high school early, he briefly enrolled in a television journalism program before leaving after one semester.

LaChiusa relocated to New York City in 1980, where he worked as a music director and accompanist while pursuing songwriting. In the mid-1980s he joined the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, where mentors helped shift his focus from comic material to more serious work. His profile rose in 1993 when The Public Theater's producer George C. Wolfe presented his First Lady Suite, followed in 1994 by Lincoln Center's Off-Broadway production of Hello Again, a series of interconnected love stories drawn from Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde. Hello Again earned ten Drama Desk Award nominations, including three for LaChiusa individually in the categories of Outstanding Book of a Musical, Outstanding Music, and Outstanding Lyrics.

In 1995, LaChiusa contributed additional book material to the Broadway musical Chronicle of a Death Foretold, an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's 1981 novella. The book, written with Graciela Daniele and Jim Lewis, earned LaChiusa a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical in 1996.

The 1999–2000 Broadway season brought LaChiusa two large-scale productions. Marie Christine, a retelling of the Medea myth set in nineteenth-century Louisiana, starred Audra McDonald. The New York Times noted that the score was so demanding that even McDonald, a classically trained singer, could perform it only six times per week rather than the standard eight. The show closed after 42 performances. Also that season, The Wild Party, based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 poem of the same name, starred Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, and Eartha Kitt. The production received seven Tony nominations but won none, after which the producers closed the show. For both Marie Christine and The Wild Party, LaChiusa received Tony Award nominations for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score, bringing his total Tony nominations in 2000 to four.

In 2003, LaChiusa's one-act musical Little Fish, based on two short stories by Deborah Eisenberg, premiered Off-Broadway. In August 2005, he published an article in Opera News that criticized several commercially successful Broadway musicals of the period, including The Producers and Hairspray, characterizing certain productions as "faux-musicals" that substituted mechanical execution for genuine craft and innovation. The piece generated significant controversy among his colleagues. That October, his musical See What I Wanna See, drawn from three stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, running through December 4, 2005. LaChiusa received Drama Desk Award nominations for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics for the work.

In April 2009, the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, premiered Giant, a musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's 1952 novel, with music and lyrics by LaChiusa and a book by Sybille Pearson. LaChiusa subsequently collaborated with Pearson again on Rain, a musical based on Somerset Maugham's short story of the same name, which received its world premiere at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre from March 24 through May 1, 2016, directed by Barry Edelstein and starring Eden Espinosa as Sadie Thompson.

Queen of the Mist, LaChiusa's musical about Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, was commissioned by the Off-Broadway company the Transport Group. After a developmental lab in fall 2010, it opened in November 2011 at The Gym at Judson, directed by Jack Cummings III with choreography by Scott Rink, and starred Mary Testa and Julia Murney. LaChiusa's First Daughter Suite, an extension of his earlier First Lady Suite, premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater on October 6, 2015, directed by Kirsten Sanderson. The musical examines the women in the lives of presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, with a cast that included Barbara Walsh, Rachel Bay Jones, Alison Fraser, Mary Testa, Betsy Morgan, and Cassie Levy, among others.

A work titled Nine Fathers of Ariel, described as a dance musical centering on a mother's effort to provide her son with positive fathering amid a war-obsessed world, received a 29-hour private industry reading on April 5, 2014. The project was a collaboration with Ellen Fitzhugh, directed by Graciela Daniele with musical direction by Mary Mitchell Campbell, and featured a cast including Tonya Pinkins, Marc Kudisch, Malcolm Gets, Telly Leung, and Darius de Haas, among others. LaChiusa and Fitzhugh also collaborated on Los Otros, originally titled Tres Niñas, which began performances at A.R.T. in New York City in August 2022, directed by Noah Himmelstein and starring Luba Mason and Caesar Samayoa.

Beyond the stage, LaChiusa won a 2008 Emmy Award for his contributions to the television series WonderPets. He serves as an adjunct professor at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has performed at cabaret and concert venues including Joe's Pub and Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series.