By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 10, 2009
At first, Sybille Pearson didn't think the challenges of transforming "Giant" the novel into "Giant" the musical would be daunting. No, she thought they were insurmountable.
After being asked by composer Michael John LaChiusa whether she was interested in writing the show's libretto, Pearson raced to a library, pored over Edna Ferber's sprawling 1952 Texas novel and came to an absolute conclusion.
"I said to my husband: 'Impossible!' "
As with so many certainties in life, however, this one proved less than airtight. Pearson, who years before wrote the book for the Richard Maltby Jr.-David Shire Broadway musical "Baby," thought about it some more. The marriage at the novel's center -- between a hidebound Texas rancher and a worldlier young woman from the East Coast -- ultimately revealed to her a rich imaginative palette. And the story's bifurcated world, of privileged Anglos and hard-pressed Mexican Americans, also opened up intriguing thematic threads -- in ways not fully explored in the 1956 film version starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean.
So Pearson gulped and said yes, and LaChiusa hit the keyboard. And now, perhaps the most daring project in Signature Theatre's 20-year history is about to reveal its melodies and psychological complexities to the world. With a cast of 21, a score 4,200 bars long, a $1 million-plus budget and a running time approaching four hours, "Giant" is sure to do one thing: live up to its title.
"It's like 'Angels in America, the Musical,' " Eric Schaeffer, Signature's artistic director, says with a laugh, in a reference to Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork.
Schaeffer -- who's already had a good month, upon learning that his theater has won this year's special regional-theater Tony Award -- would be thrilled if "Giant" has anything remotely close to the seismic impact of "Angels." But that's a long shot: A wide public embrace has eluded the 46-year-old LaChiusa.
A craftsman of passionate if cerebral idiosyncrasy who marches to his own convention-defying drummer, LaChiusa has admirers if not a huge following. His music is highly demanding and his subjects highly unlikely, from his adaptation of García Lorca's "The House of Bernarda Alba" to a musical portrait for Signature of van Gogh in the 2004 show "The Highest Yellow." His musical treatment of "The Wild Party," Joseph Moncure March's Jazz Age poem, starred Eartha Kitt and Mandy Patinkin but closed on Broadway in June 2000, after only 68 performances.
Some of those who've heard his score for "Giant," however, say that this one might hew more closely to popular taste than some of his other works. Bruce Coughlin, who created the orchestrations for the show, describes the work as "fun, because it's so tuneful." Schaeffer adds, "This is his most accessible piece, which is really exciting."
Sitting a few weeks ago in a room filled with vending machines, a floor beneath "Giant's" Manhattan rehearsal studio, LaChiusa professed admiration for Schaeffer's instant openness to the composer's epic vision of the piece. "I knew it was going to be huge," LaChiusa explains. "I was thinking three acts -- maybe over three nights.
"I said to Eric: 'I do have an idea, but I want to do a three-act version.' He said: 'Of course.' Because he's Eric."
The three-act musical, featuring a mostly New York cast -- best known to Signature audiences might be Lewis Cleale, veteran of the company's well-received "Passion" in 1996 -- marks another significant milestone for Signature: It is the first fruit of an extraordinary gift that came the Arlington troupe's way three years ago. The Shen Family Foundation, a philanthropy overseen by a New York devotee of musical theater, Theodore P. Shen, and his wife, Mary Jo, gave Signature $1 million to support the work of three composers, whose resulting musicals were to receive productions there.
Lo and behold, the money from the American Musical Voices Project -- $100,000 over four years plus health benefits to each of the composers, and the rest earmarked for other commissions and costs -- does not seem to be tumbling down a black hole of pipe dreams and false starts. (Shen later added $300,000 for another musical development program at Signature.)
With Pearson, his teaching partner in a musical-theater program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, LaChiusa, one of the original grantees, produced this work in what feels like record time. It's a project Signature has fully supported at each step, despite the inherent difficulties in marketing a new show of such length. The official opening is tonight.
The idea for a musical based on the Ferber novel was first suggested to LaChiusa years ago by Julie Gilbert, Ferber's great-niece, who is now in charge of the author's estate. ("Show Boat," the 1927 musical considered the prototype of the American "book" musical, was an adaptation of another Ferber novel.) Early in his career, Gilbert had become enamored of LaChiusa's work and arranged to meet him.
"I said, 'You know, this is crazy, but would you be interested in doing a musical version of 'Giant'?" she recalled in a phone interview from her Florida home. "He looked at me with such . . . skepticism and said, 'I could no more do that than fly.' So that was that. The book closed there. And we didn't see each other for many, many years."
Still, Gilbert -- who was named for a character in "Show Boat" -- thought the novel had a music in it the movie didn't, and LaChiusa remained in the back of her mind. "I was looking for a unique voice, someone who doesn't remind anyone of any other voices," she says. "Someone like Ferber who would do his homework, because you have to understand the indigenous quality of Texas, of the state, before you can write a note."
Texas is a major character in "Giant." "Big as all New England, plus New Jersey and New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio," sings Leslie, the Virginia woman played by Betsy Morgan, with whom Cleale's Bick conducts a whirlwind courtship and whom he ensconces in his massive Reata Ranch. The story reflects each of their relationships to Texas, which in turn expresses something about the eternally unsettled nature of their marriage.
Spanning about 25 years in the mid-20th century, the plot also concerns the paternalistic attitudes of white Texans toward the Mexicans who labored in their houses and fields. And it poses inordinate hurdles for actors who over the course of the story would have to age from their 20s to their 50s.
Ultimately, LaChiusa came around. He decided maybe he and "Giant" really could fly. "I'm always on the hunt for a project that will challenge me," he says, adding that in Ferber's incorporation of big ideas and issues, such as the "aphrodisiac power of oil," he encountered a kindred spirit. "The book was very prescient, in how oil money would one day deeply affect us," he says. "She gets that America is sexy, in spite of all of its problems."
After Pearson signed on, the writing took off. "She discovered a way into the piece that opened my eyes to the novel," LaChiusa explains. Each act, he says, is built around a big gathering: a barbecue, a party, a hotel function, which gave it the structure it needed.
Schaeffer originally was going to direct; he staged a workshop in New York last summer. But the scope of the project was just too immense. "It was going to take a really strong hand, a producer, to pull all the pieces together," Schaeffer says, "and it was clear I could not do both and do them well." Recruited to take over directorial duties was the British-born Jonathan Butterell, who choreographed the Broadway revival of "Nine" and created the musical staging of Adam Guettel's "The Light in the Piazza."
A canvas of this scale inevitably invites all sorts of interpretations. For Butterell, a key theme of the musical is the meaning this patch of land has for the characters. "The real debate is what are our values and where do they lie?" he says. "The value of the land, and holding on to it are true values." To that end, Butterell has conceived a broad, open stage with rudimentary adornments: "a wide platform and a small strip of sky."
It's not easy to envision how all of the Lone Star State could be conjured in the close confines of Signature's black-box space. But the actors say that the show operates at once on intimate and grander levels. "To me, it's about family," says Cleale, whose character ages in "Giant" from 28 to 53. "It's about life being gray, about loss and love and death and survival." That sounds like a whole heaping portion of "about." Still, when the subject is Texas, bigness comes with the territory.
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