First Daughter Suite
Opening Night: October 21, 2015
Closing: November 22, 2015
Theater: The Public Theater
A historical fantasia in four parts, First Daughter Suite follows Patricia Nixon and daughters Tricia and Julie, Rosalynn and Amy Carter, Betty and Susan Ford, Patti Davis and mom Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush and daughter-in-law Laura as they strive to live meaningful lives in the public eye, while dealing with the complex private relationships all of us face with our parents and children. Directed by Kirsten Sanderson, this wholly captivating new musical with a lush, sweeping score is a deeply felt new work about mothers, daughters and the surprising discoveries we make about one another as we grow.
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October 21, 2015
Is there such a thing as compassionate political satire, a genre both withering and caressing, divertingly superficial and disturbingly deep? How about compassionate political satiric opera? It seems unlikely there will ever be many examples of such an improbable mutant. But should any brave artists choose to try their hands at this fantastical hybrid, they will be hard-pressed to top the mastery of the form demonstrated by Michael John LaChiusa in his “First Daughter Suite,” the sui generis musical that opened on Wednesday night at the Public Theater. This four-part oratorio is a sequel, of sorts, to Mr. LaChiusa’s “First Lady Suite” (1993), and it shares with that earlier piece a focus on the female inhabitants of a place described here in song as “a house that will never be a home.” That would be the White House, where occupants are transformed overnight into exotic zoological specimens to be gazed upon with amusement, prurience, resentment and wonder by the world at large.
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