First Daughter Suite – The Public Theater, New York

Betsy Morgan, Barbara Walsh, and Caissie Levy in First Daughter Suite at The Public Theater, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

First Daughter Suite continues at The Public Theater, New York until 15 November.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Composer-lyricist-librettist Michael John LaChiusa is known for creating demanding and somewhat esoteric musical theatre. And for audiences up for that kind of work, his latest opus, First Daughter Suite, will not disappoint. It should also prove to be highly enjoyable, as it takes an imaginative but incisive look into the psyches of some recent female inhabitants of the White House: the wives and daughters of six modern-times US presidents.

LaChiusa has interwoven into his complex and copious score some lush melodic passages that could stand alone as show tunes – tunes that with enough reprises could actually cause you to walk out of the theatre humming. The ear-filling orchestrations by Michael Starobin and Bruce Coughlin are vibrantly played by the six-piece orchestra. And LaChiusa’s stories should be catnip for followers of the contemporary US political scene.

The work has been given an appreciative Off-Broadway production by The Public Theater, a long-time champion of LaChiusa, pulling together – under the direction of Kirsten Sanderson, a past LaChiusa collaborator – a cast of nine splendid actresses who can handle the challenging music with no visible signs of strain, and also be convincing as they portray the script’s assortment of well-known ladies. In this regard, Toni-Leslie James’ costumes and Robert-Charles Vallance’s hair and wig design lend a mighty helping hand.

In the first of four sequences, Pat Nixon (Barbara Walsh), wife of the scheming and finally beleaguered President Richard Nixon, attempts to avoid chaos on the wedding day of her oldest daughter Tricia (Betsy Morgan), while the shadow of political disaster comes ever closer. Not exactly helping things are Tricia’s officious, younger and already-married sister, Julie (Caissie Levy), and Pat’s doom-prophesying mother-in-law, Hannah (Therese McCarthy).

LaChiusa’s imagination almost runs off the track in his second tale, but his political savvy holds it together. He takes us inside a dream of preteen Amy Carter (Carly Tamer), the daughter of President Jimmy Carter. In her dream, Amy is on a voyage on the Presidential yacht along with her mother Rosalynn (Rachel Bay Jones), Betty Ford (Alison Fraser), the wife of Gerald Ford, Carter’s predecessor in the White House, and the Ford daughter Susan (Betsy Morgan, again). It’s a lighthearted trip, marked by the happily inebriated Betty’s insistence on dancing, until the group decides to sail to Iran and rescue the hostages that have provided quite a problem for the Carter administration. This venture does not go well, but since it’s a dream, things finally conclude on a brighter note.

In the third sequence, a bitter Patti Davis (Caissie Levy), daughter of President Ronald Reagan, rails against her mother Nancy Reagan (Alison Fraser), as they lounge at the pool of a wealthy California friend. Nancy’s maid, Anita Castelo (Isabel Santiago), who was accused but later cleared of gun-running to her native Paraguay, is also on the scene to give Nancy a helping hand in controlling her near-hysterical offspring.

A flinty Barbara Bush (Mary Testa), wife of the former President George Herbert Walker Bush, is the centre of the final scene. We see her communing with the ghost of her long-dead daughter Robin (Theresa McCarthy), while at the same time warding off the pleas of daughter-in-law Laura Bush (Rachel Bay Jones), wife of President George W Bush, to help in George W’s campaign for a second presidential term.

It‘s a soulful summing up of what LaChiusa’s heroines sacrifice in living their lives in the spotlight that blares continuously on their house, a house, as they sing in the show’s apt lyric, that can never be a home.

Back in 1993, The Public produced LaChiusa’s First Lady Suite, which dealt in similar fashion with four other Presidential wives. He has said that he does not see First Daughter Suite as a sequel but rather as an extension of his obsession with these women and also with the mother-daughter relationship, which has been key to some of his other works. As First Daughter Suite continues to prove, it is a fruitful obsession.

Ron Cohen