FROM AROUND THE WORLD: CHICAGO.(Lovers and Friends (Chautauqua Variations))(Review)

Michael John LaChiusa, as composer and librettist, already has accumulated some solid hits and shaky misses in his young career. His latest, Lovers and Friends (Chautauqua Variations), given its world premiere by Lyric Opera of Chicago's Center for American Artists on June 29, is more success than failure, but musical reinforcement is urgently needed. The problem lies not in the piece's identity crisis, though it does seem unclear whether it wants to be a musical play or a full-fledged opera. There might be no crisis at all; just because we can't pigeon-hole Sweeney Todd or Candide hasn't for a moment stopped those shows in their well-oiled tracks. What Lovers and Friends, in its present state, demands and deserves is more muscle to make the score rise to LaChiusa's genuinely dramatic libretto; whether the muscle should be toned up to the power of what we think of as opera or to a show-business sort of wildness is up to him.

The aforementioned libretto is certainly dramatic, even though it's rather soapy for an opera. A household in Chautauqua, New York (LaChiusa's hometown), consists of American poet laureate Babbitt Cross, his wife, Lucy, and what the score describes as their "tremendously pregnant" daughter, Isis. The father of the expected twins is a rock star who will be permanently absent. Babbitt is being urged by everyone to defuse some of the cynical poem he's written for the inauguration of the president-elect. Lucy is on the brink of leaving the poet for an opera conductor of no evident distinction. He has cancelled Tosca in Houston to be with her, for God's sake! Other visitors include Betsy, Babbitt's tough-tempered publisher; her newish husband, the glamorous Senator Laughlin, whose love-affair with a twenty-one-year-old male Congressional page is about to hit the national fan. (Boils Betsy; "Did it have to be a page? An intern would have been old news.")

And there's Babbitt's longtime friend, Nimrod Baruch, whose research on a book about women resistance fighters uncovers evidence that Babbitt's first, career-making poems may have come from a Frenchwoman, ultimately tortured and killed, who protected him when he was wounded in World War II. The woman appears in a flashback and also as a ghost, haunting the poet's conscience throughout the opera. The ending is sort of happy: Babbitt ...