It’s the season for new musicals based on the girlhoods of real-life entertainers reared by single moms. On the heels of Alicia Keys’s Hell’s Kitchen, which uses the pop star’s song catalog to chronicle her teen years in midtown Manhattan, Lincoln Center Theater is presenting a new musical from Michael John LaChiusa about the upbringing of the nearly 84-year-old Broadway and dance legend Graciela Daniele. The Gardens of Anuncia, which Daniele choreographs and directs, follows her childhood in 1940s Argentina during the rise of the Perón regime and how the adults in her life shaped her remarkable trajectory as an artist and a human.
The lessons come primarily from the three women in her life: her mother (Eden Espinosa, flashing a grounded maturity), a single mom and amateur tango dancer who worked as a secretary for the local governor and introduced her to ballet, initially as a means of fixing her flat feet; her mother’s sister (Andréa Burns, elegantly soulful), who helped develop her passion for music and storytelling; and her grandmama (delightfully brassy Mary Testa), “agreeably separated” from her merchant-marine husband, who nurtured her granddaughter’s “flair for the dramatic.” And while her father is mostly MIA, grandpapa makes an occasional appearance (Enrique Acevedo, who also takes on multiple other male roles), to gift her with a sense of wanderlust that will take her far from Argentina, first to Europe and then to a long and successful career in New York City.
Priscilla Lopez, herself a Broadway legend as the original Diana Morales in A Chorus Line, elegantly narrates the story as the older version of Graciela, here named Anuncia, recounting her life in her garden as she reluctantly prepares to accept a lifetime achievement award. Kalyn West, lithe and lovely and looking like the young Natalie Wood in West Side Story, shadows Lopez as a wide-eyed younger version of Anuncia.
Michael John LaChiusa, a longtime Daniele collaborator, has written a delightful and richly melodic score which initially leans heavily on solos as the matriarchs in Anuncia’s life dispense their pearls of wisdom. The simplicity of the score deepens in the group numbers, including a charming opening number about “mama, grandmama, tia and me” and a more complex later quartet in which Anuncia and her three matriarchal influences create a goosebump-worthy four-part harmony that you long to go on forever. To a person, the cast sounds sensational, backed by a 10-person orchestra that includes an accordion-like bandoleon to lend additional Argentine flavor.
The Gardens of Anuncia is a captivating chamber musical that straddles the line between modesty and maximalism, stubbornly defying both categorization and commercial impulses. After all, this is a show that openly embraces magic realism, featuring not one but two singing deer, complete with antlers (both played by Tally Sessions). And there’s a stripped-down quality to the production reflected in Mark Wendland’s simple stylized set (which suggests a series of beaded curtains); Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s colorful lighting; and Toni-Leslie James’s deceptively simple costumes. Surprisingly, Daniele is even parsimonious in her use of choreography, deploying just enough to capture her portrait of the artist as a young hoofer without losing sight of the overall arc of her memory-play of a story. There’s a restraint here — a measured deployment of music, motion and narrative — that reflects artists in full, mature command of their gifts.
My full review appears in the February/March 2024 issue of U.K.-based Musicals magazine.
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