There couldn’t have been a better setting for Michael John LaChiusa’s First Daughter Suite than the Public, except, maybe, the White House. The Anspacher Theater, with its white columns darting up from a house that curls around the playing space, provided a stately alternative. LaChiusa’s much-anticipated spiritual sequel to First Lady Suite begins in the exact fashion of its predecessor, with a cast of elegant, exhausted White House women singing the question “Do you know what I wish for?” We, the audience, answer no, implore LaChiusa and the cast to tell us what lies behind the famous photographs in our history textbooks. Thus, the play begins.
What makes LaChiusa’s storytelling so complex and engaging is his bold dives into the realm of the fantastical. In First Daughter Suite, the audience is whisked away from the very real and heartfelt struggles of daughters and mothers on the day of the Nixon wedding, to the bizarre boat ride to free Iranian hostages in twelve-year-old Amy Carter’s dream. In the second act, Nancy Reagan and Patti Davis engage in a domestic power play the size of the Cold War, and “Granite Granny” Barbara Bush reconciles her painful past with the help of her daughter-in-law. The stories are all markedly unique, and the audience truly does feel as though we’re peeling back the photographs of our American royalty, eavesdropping on their troubles and their joys.
The cast of First Daughter Suite boasts not only a slew of powerful female performers, but a real ensemble in which every actor is given the opportunity to shine. When their opportunity comes, boy, do they take it. They handle LaChiusa arias with the virtuosity one would expect of Broadway veterans but then venture to take their performances a step further, until even the President of the United States himself would be foolish to try and speak over them. They play out the fantasy lives of these First Ladies with a graceful kind of grit, accessing a real-world honesty even in dreamlike situations.
Additional compliments to Toni-Leslie James for putting together costumes that are just as picture-perfect as we remember them, as well as Michael Starobin and Bruce Coughlin for orchestrations that never missed a beat, unless LaChiusa intended it that way. First Daughter Suite runs at the Public through November 22nd.
