Queen of the Mist

Program Notes

Director’s Note

Queen of the Mist tells the story of Anna Edson Taylor and her singular and astonishing feat: becoming the first person to ride a barrel over Niagara Falls.

For an unmarried woman in her early sixties at the turn of the century, Anna’s life offered little in the way of both security and opportunity. With nothing to lose, Anna conjures up her death-defying barrel stunt in the hope that she’ll live through it and be rewarded with admiration, fame, and fortune. The world marvels at her brave and foolhardy stunt, but Anna’s 15 minutes of fame fail to lift her out of poverty. Instead, she has a profound spiritual experience while going over the falls, one that sustains her through the final years of her life.

Anna Edson Taylor, brazen, stubborn, brave, and determined with her one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life story and uncommon world view, is such a great musical theater character. I’m inspired by the way she defied the conventional restrictions placed on women in her time. Successfully pursuing ideas that others believe are impossible is so important. It’s the very thing that empowers humanity and advances civilization, and that’s why Edson Taylor’s crazy adventure is a tale worth sharing.

—Kirsten Sanderson, Director

I Sing of Michael John

I want to tell you why I believe that Michael John LaChiusa is one of our most valuable writers of musical theater, and why you should get to know his many beautiful and singular works.

From the first time I heard Michael John’s words and music—in the spring of 1984 at the much-anticipated, annual BMI Showcase in New York City—they captured me. They made me sit up and listen! His was a new young voice with a unique way of both perceiving the world and turning it into song and storytelling.

For his debut in front of musical theater professionals in New York City, he had musicalized Carson McCullers’s haunting 1951 novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café, a tangled human triangle that introduced readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable rural, Southern woman. This novella’s view of love is dark, to put it mildly.

Michael John was only 21 at the time. But he was already attracted to telling even the brutal truths of life in song. Right from the start, he was telling the stories of strong, exceptional, enduring women who overcome against all the odds.

It would be several years before he and I began to work together as artist and his agent. By 1993, we had transitioned to working together at the Public Theater, where I was the associate producer under George C. Wolfe. We worked together on three shows there: his First Lady Suite; The Petrified Prince, directed by Hal Prince; and, on Broadway, The Wild Party, starring Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, and Eartha Kitt.

By this point, you may have surmised that Michael John doesn’t write typical Broadway musicals. “Boy-Gets-Girl” doesn’t happen often. The happy endings, when they arrive, can be bittersweet.

For example, First Lady Suite offers unexpected, humorous, and poignant glimpses into the White House backstage lives of Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, and Jackie Kennedy. It turned out Michael John was a First Lady-ologist, and he was blazing his own trail in the theater. (Kirsten Sanderson, our director of this concert production of Queen of the Mist and Michael John’s long-time collaborator, was also the director of the premiere productions of First Lady Suite and First Daughter Suite—and very much a part of their creation.)

For many years, Michael John referred to his work as music-theater, which, after musicals and opera, is a third stream of work that began in early 20th-century Europe and became popular in New York City in the downtown experimental theater of the 1970s and 1980s. Those familiar with our music-theater tradition will remember the work of Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Martha Clarke, some works by Philip Glass, early Bill Bolcom, and a few others. One could even say that later Sondheim (Sunday in the Park, Assassins, and Passion) is more like music-theater than a Broadway musical. Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera can be thought of in this tradition as well.

If you listen to his First Lady Suite (1993), Marie-Christine (1999), The Wild Party (2000), Queen of the Mist (2011), First Daughter Suite (2015), and The Gardens of Anuncia (2023), you will find strong, interesting, nonconformist or disobedient women who have been held back by circumstances and the expectations of our male-dominated society from achieving free and fully empowered lives. Some live more privileged lives than the others (the First Ladies, for example). But most of them fight against deeply frustrating restrictions or the alternative—invisibility or erasure.

At this moment, our society is shockingly misogynist—more than at any time in my life. We need Michael John’s women because they remind us of who and what women can and should be. That they are entitled to be what they want to be. And they do it without losing their sense of humor.

Often, I am very moved by his unique combination of characters, stories, words, music, and theater. His work pierces me. The human truths he reveals often hurt. And most of the time, I shed tears. I experience a catharsis that I didn’t see coming. And likely, I’ll experience it again the next time I see or listen to that particular moment in the show.

Astoundingly, Michael John has written at least 20 produced works as well as three more that are in pre-production! His extraordinary productivity, endurance, and resilience are inspiring, to say the least. For more than 30 years I’ve travelled all over the country to see his shows: to DC, San Diego, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, the Berkshires, and Nantucket. All these experiences have only strengthened my strong and enduring conviction that his work is important.

Michael John is sui generis. His work is deeply rewarding to a discerning audience as well as the actors performing it onstage. It sings the truth about us as a people and the country we inhabit and have shaped. And it deserves to be experienced again and again.

If you’ve never experienced a musical by Michael John LaChiusa, may Queen of the Mist be the first of many.

—Wiley Hausam, Director, PEAK Performances