It's shaping up to be quite the Chicago season for gay lyricist and opera librettist Michael Korie.
Porchlight Music Theatre is currently presenting the Windy City premiere of Korie's 2013 off-Broadway musical Far from Heaven ( co-written with composer Scott Frankel and playwright Richard Greenberg ). Korie is also part of the original writing team of the 2006 musical Grey Gardens who will reunite for the upcoming world premiere musical War Paint at the Goodman Theatre starring two-time Tony Award-winners Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.
During a recent telephone interview with the Windy City Times, Korie touched on many aspects of his long writing career. He started out as a journalist covering gay and lesbian issues for the Village Voice in New York before he started composing his own songs.
"I was writing music and going into clubs and singing and playing it, but there was no one to write the words so I became a lyricist and I found I liked that better," Korie said. "I found that certain composers did so much more interesting and unexpected things with my words."
Korie also liked having a collaborator to work with because "it's also a hell of a lot of work to try and get your show produced, and it really helps to have a partner and share the burden."
Korie initially rose to fame as an opera librettist, notably in collaboration with composer Stuart Wallace for the biographical opera Harvey Milk, which debuted at Houston Grand Opera in 1995. Recounting the life and 1978 assassination of the United States' first openly gay politician, Korie also feels Harvey Milk was an important work that also marked the first time romantic duets for openly gay characters were depicted on the operatic stage.
That more opera companies haven't staged Harvey Milk in light of the Academy Award-winning 2008 movie Milk shows how conservative American opera companies still are with their programming. Yet Korie was pleased that Harvey Milk received its Australian premiere last year.
Korie is also known for adapting John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath into a 2007 opera with gay composer Ricky Ian Gordon. The opera originally started as a three-act piece, though Korie said he and Gordon have revised it down to a two-act after more than 10 years later—very much lamenting the complicated production schedule of staging new operas.
"Nobody has noticed the gay content in [The Grapes of Wrath]," Korie said. "And I've always not been a 'rah-rah' role model" with gay characters."
This is certainly the case with Far from Heaven, which is based upon Todd Haynes' acclaimed 2002 film of the same name, about a 1950s housewife named Cathy Whitaker who kindles a romance with an African-American man after discovering that her husband, Frank, is gay. Korie was very proud about the complexity of Frank and about writing him a selfish self-realization song in the show.
"At first I thought it was an odd choice, because I thought it would be operatic," said Korie about playwright Richard Greenberg's desire to musicalize Far from Heaven. "Also, I questioned how you could do what that film did, which is to tell a story that was moving but also had an ironic distance at the same time."
Korie said he and his collaborators could have made Far from Heaven into a campy and jokey show like so many new musicals nowadays that mock the form and the wholesome image of mid-century America.
"There's been all kinds of musicals of the past 20 years where there are numerous Tupperware jokes and where they write Lesley Gore kind of songs and poke fun at the 1950s and exaggerate everything," Korie said. "But that would not have served the kind of interesting way that this story treads the line" in what he said was Greenberg's idea to write the show as "un-ironic camp."
Korie also started to delve into the creation of War Paint before he realized that he wasn't allowed to talk to the media about it just yet. So instead he did touch upon the luxury of tailoring musical theater roles to specific stars, like writing for Tony Award-winner Kelli O'Hara who was part of Far from Heaven from its beginnings, and for Patti LuPone who appeared in past Korie/Frankel workshops of musicals that didn't come to fruition.
"We did love to work directly for [Patti LuPone]. She's such a wonderful actress so it's a privilege to hear what she has to say," Korie said. "I feel the exact same way about Christine [Ebersose]. We basically wrote Grey Gardens for Christine and she was there before the piece was finished at the very first workshop and subsequent ones. And she's such an amazing performer that we kept saying let's put a song for Christine here and then you end up with a score that more difficult than Gypsy."
Korie said some writers are finicky about taking suggestions from actors in the creation of new works, but he and Frankel are not at all that way.
"It's such a collaborative form with people doing book and lyrics, that I think the actors are just as integral to that collaboration," Korie said. "They're the ones who have to do it every night and sometimes they have a much better barometer of truth."
Porchlight Music Theatre's regional premiere of Far from Heaven continues through Sunday, March 13, at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays ( 1:30 p.m. only on March 3 ), 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays with 2 p.m. matinees on Sundays. Tickets are $32-$48. Call 773-327-5252 or visit www.porchlightmusictheatre.org .
The world premiere of War Paint starring Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole begins Tuesday, June 28, at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St. Tickets are currently available for subscribers. For more information, call 312-443-3800 or visit www.goodmantheatre.org .
