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Seeds of a Magic Memoir
by | Dec 3, 2023 10:33 am
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Posted to: Theater
Julieta Cervantes Photo
Anuncia (Priscilla Lopez) remembers the three women who raised her.
The Gardens of Anuncia
Mitzi Newhouse Theater
Lincoln Center
150 W 65th St.
New York City
Runs through 12/31
Strange things can happen in Anuncia’s garden. The plants crave conversation, wild deer dance boleros, and old childhood memories come to life like fairy tales. At one point, Anuncia, the musical’s director-choreographer narrator who’s stalling in the suburbs before she goes to accept a lifetime achievement award, acknowledges her story’s magical turns. “In my garden,” she says, “magic realism is just reality.”
Anuncia (Priscilla Lopez) talks directly to the audience, wry and twinkling, as she does throughout the musical. There’s an easy, almost conspiratorial intimacy between her and the crowd at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theater -– here cast as rows of flowers, not people -– as she tells stories from her past.
The Gardens of Anuncia is a whimsical, small-scale new musical about growing up and grieving family members. But more than anything else, it’s an enchanted memoir that happens to take a theatrical form.
Written by Michael John LaChiusa, The Gardens of Anuncia is adapted from the childhood of director-choreographer Graciela Daniele, who also helms the production. Like Anuncia, Daniele grew up in Argentina during the rise of the Perón regime in the 1940s and ’50s. Both trained with Argentina’s prestigious Téatro Colon ballet before moving to New York and ultimately finding their way to musical theater.
When Anuncia says, teasingly, that she’ll never write a memoir, it’s Daniele’s voice we hear. The Gardens of Anuncia may be as close as we get to a memoir from Daniele -– if not one that spans her decades-long career in theater, then one written as a love letter to the three women who raised her.
There’s Mami (Eden Espinosa), Tía (Andréa Burns), and Granmama (Mary Testa). Together, the trio takes care of the young Anuncia (Kalyn West), a curious, spritely girl for whom growing up means learning to see the darkness that underpins the wonders of her childhood. Their matriarchy is unshakeable, but implicit in the way the women protect each other is the abuse they’ve suffered from men. Granmama’s husband, whom she met working as his family’s maid, has spent most of their marriage overseas. Tía saw her mother’s life and never got married. Anuncia’s father’s absence is the most acute. Despite gambling away their money, Mami still believes he can be redeemed. Anuncia struggles to make sense of the relationships around her. At the same time, the horrors of the Péron dictatorship grow harder for her to ignore, especially when Mami gets a job working for the government.
The Gardens of Anuncia covers a lot of ground, but what makes it so charming is that it knows how to be small. The musical touches huge emotional wellsprings -– its inciting incident is Anuncia’s decision to finally bury the last of her matriarchs’ ashes -– but it does so with a delicate hand. Each song is a self-contained ecosystem, loosely strung to rest by the older Anuncia’s associative, if sometimes repetitive, narration.
Although LaChiusa is known for harmonically complex, irregular writing, here, his score here is simple. Rather than musicalizing intricate dialogue, LaChiusa’s songs dole out lessons, prompted by young Anuncia’s curiosities. Tia’s answer to why she never married comes in the form of a delightful sequence where she entertains advances from the “mustache brothers” but realizes she prefers her independence. Granmama defends her passionate yet rage-fueled marriage in a brassy, cabaret-style character song. (When Anuncia asks why they don’t live together, Testa fires back, in expert delivery: “Your grandfather values life.”) Daniele’s eye for visual metaphor comes through in Mami’s song: a wrenching tango ballad, where she risks to dance with a revolving door of men despite knowing how much it depletes her.
The three matriarchs loom as large in the musical as they do in Anuncia’s memory. LaChiusa and Daniele render Mami, Tía and Granmama with fanciful affection without neglecting nuance. Their writing is helped massively by the three musical theater heavy-hitters they’ve cast to bring the roles to life. The trio works in three-part harmony: Espinosa’s dramatic power, Burns’ cheeky sweetness, and Testa’s uncanny ability to make any line a punchline with a shrug or an eyebrow raise. Together, they make The Gardens of Anuncia fun to watch, while grounding the admiration Anuncia still feels for them in the present, years after they’ve all passed away.
Surrounded by such vibrant characters, Anuncia tends to get lost. In the frame narrative, her function is to remember. Lopez deftly calibrates the tone of the story and introduces new details before stepping aside to let the memory sequences play out. As young Anuncia, West is tasked with playing the character across an indiscriminate period of time from early childhood to young adulthood. West is lovely throughout, particularly in the few moments she gets to dance. Nevertheless, it’s hard to gauge how old she’s supposed to be in each scene, which flattens her arc.
Perhaps for that reason, I found myself wishing that The Gardens of Anuncia had more dance. To be sure, Daniele’s musical staging has moments of movement. There’s the tango number, West’s brief bursts of ballet, and a dance sequence for Lopez, who originated the role of Diana Morales in A Chorus Line. But they never reach the level of emotional exuberance that’s found everywhere else in the musical. Even more strikingly, despite the show’s focus on the beginnings of Anuncia’s (or Daniele’s) love for dance, the choreography felt more coincidental to a particular song or two than essential to the fabric of the piece.
Still, The Gardens of Anuncia finds glints of magic in the deliciously bizarre. At one moment, a deer (Tally Sessions in corduroy and antlers) takes a break from nibbling Anuncia’s plants to sing to her about love. They find common ground. They slow dance. They almost kiss, but the deer breaks away and runs off to his dental appointment. It is, as Anuncia says, weird. And at the same time, it’s beautiful.
Next Up: I’ll be reviewing Waterwell’s A Good Day To Me Not To You at the Connelly Theater.
