Michael Korie (born April 1, 1955) is an American librettist and lyricist whose writing for musical theater and opera includes the musicals Grey Gardens and Far From Heaven, and the operas Harvey Milk and The Grapes of Wrath. His works have been produced on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and internationally. His lyrics have been nominated for the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award. In 2016, Korie was awarded the Marc Blitzstein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.American Academy of Arts and Letters. http://www.artsandletters.org/awards2_popup.php?abbrev=Blitzstein
Biography Korie was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of Benjamin and Janet Indick. His father, a pharmacist, published scholarly essays on H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. His mother is a sculptor and President Emeritus of the National Association of Women Artists. Raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, he graduated from Teaneck High School in 1973. Korie studied music at Brandeis University before transferring to the journalism department of New York University. In the mid-1970s he worked as a journalist, freelancing and editing for The Village Voice and other Manhattan weeklies. His background in reporting informed several works he was to write based on non-fiction figures in the news.
Operas and musicals
Where's Dick? The first work of Korie's to receive major attention was a "new-vaudeville" crossover opera called Where's Dick?, composed by Stewart Wallace and developed at Playwrights Horizons. A satire that transformed current events into a comic book world of villainy, the opera featured characters including the “midget master builder” Stump Tower, based on Donald Trump, and the twin Tarnish Brothers: Sterling and Stainless, inspired by William and Lamar Hunt's attempts to corner the world silver market. It premiered at the Miller Outdoor Theater in 1989 in a production mounted by the Houston Grand Opera and directed by Richard Foreman." 'Where's Dick?' Listing" operaamerica.org, accessed April 26, 2015 Writing in The New York Times, critic Bernard Holland called it "the type of musical stage work…we ought to be pursuing". The Village Voice’s Leighton Kerner described it as "a grisly comic indictment, both grotesque and sublime".Holland, Bernard. "Seeking a Phantom Dick Tracy". The New York Times. June 4, 1989.
Kabbalah Korie's next collaboration with Wallace was Kabbalah, conceived in seven musical sections or “gates” according to Kabbalistic philosophy. The work's libretto is written entirely in archaic languages, including Medieval French and German, early Spanish, and Aramaic, in order to trace the growth of Kabbalistic practice through the Jewish Diaspora. Recordings of interviews he conducted while in residence among orthodox Kabbalistic communities in Jerusalem were mixed into live performances during the work's 1989 premiere, co-produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival and Dance Theater Workshop, with direction and choreography by Ann Carlson. John Rockwell in The New York Times said of it, "Kabbalah may prove ultimately more important for what it promises than for what it provides. But even what it provides has its real merits."Rockwell, John. "Kabbalah". New-Music Festival; 10 Souls Act Out the Mysticism of 'Kabbalah' The New York Times, November 20, 1989
Harvey Milk Korie’s next collaboration with Stewart Wallace was the opera Harvey Milk, conceived as an epic opera in three acts and co-commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, and San Francisco Opera. It depicts the life of the slain politician and gay-rights activist Harvey Milk. The first act (“The Closet”) represents Milk's early years as a closeted stock broker in New York, his arrest in central park, and his decision to depart for San Francisco with his lover Scott Smith in the wake of the Stonewall Rebellion. The second act (“The Castro”) charts Milk's transformation from a San Francisco camera store owner to an elected City Supervisor. The Third Act (“City Hall”) dramatizes his hardball-style politicking and head-butting with his assassin, fellow Supervisor Dan White. Milk's premonition of his death is shown in the aria “If a Bullet Should Enter My Brain...,” as he makes a tape recording of his last will just weeks before his murder by White.
The opera premiered on January 21, 1995, at the Houston Grand Opera"'Harvey Milk' Listing" operaamerica.org, accessed April 26, 2015 and generated controversy over the first presentation of openly gay love scenes on the operatic stage. The Chicago Tribune called it "one of the best new operas in years" and The Independent’s Edward Seckerson wrote "the libretto is among the sharpest in contemporary opera".Rothstein, Edward. "Opera Review: ‘Harvey Milk’", The New York Times, January 23, 1995.von Rhein, John. " 'Harvey Milk' Premieres With Timely Tribute To Gay Martyr", The Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1995Seckerson, Edward. "Long Live the King", The Independent, 30 January 30, 1995 K. Robert Schwartz in The New York Times wrote “Harvey Milk is an unflinching in-your-face kind of opera, a work that examines not only Milk’s tragedy but the awakening of gay consciousness in America.”Schwartz, Robert K. "A Brash Opera Holds a Mirror to Gay Life in America". The New York Times. April 2, 1995.
Performances followed at New York City Opera and San Francisco Opera. Joshua Kosman in The San Francisco Chronicle wrote of the SFO production, “By turns haunting and hilarious, brassy and mystically poetic, the libretto is a magnificent creation.”Golden, Tim. A Gay Camelot Comes Home to Find It’s True”. The New York Times. 30 November 1996. The opera was recorded by Teldec in 1998, with Donald Runnicles conducting.
A concert work for soloists, chorus and orchestra, Kaddish for Harvey Milk, was reworked by the composer from forty-five minutes of text and music extracted from the opera's third act requiem before its premiere. The work was presented in London as part of the Maida Vale Concerts series in 2002, performed by the BBC Symphony. In February 2015, a new semi-staged concert version drawn from the entire opera was presented in Melbourne, Australia, directed by Cameron Lukie, and again in Sydney in 2016.
Hopper’s Wife Wallace and Korie's next opera, the three-character ninety-minute Hopper's Wife, imagines Josephine Hopper, wife of painter Edward Hopper, transformed into the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Of its premiere at Long Beach Opera in 1997, music critic Mark Swed wrote in The Los Angeles Times, "Korie offers exciting images and horribly crude ones side by side; clever rhymes intentionally confuse smut with art. Brave, bold and important."Swed, Mark. " 'Hopper's Wife': Not for the Faint of Art" The Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1997 Art in America said that the production "made a case for opera as a genuinely adult art form able to confront and decry the current 'dumbed-down' state of American culture."Feingold, Michael. Grey Gardens. The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2005-2006. ed. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins. New York: Limelight Editions, 2007. p. 49. In 2016, the newly revived New York City Opera selected the opera for its inaugural season, producing the work's East Coast premiere at Harlem Stage in a production conducted by James Lowe and directed by Andreas Mitisek.Cooper, Michael. "City Opera Unveils Rest of Season" The New York Times, February 22, 2016
Doll Concurrent with his work in opera, Korie began a collaboration in musical theater with composer Scott Frankel. Their first work, Doll, dramatized painter Oscar Kokoschka's fetishistic love for a life-sized, functioning doll modeled after Gustav Mahler's widow Alma Mahler.Jones, Kenneth. "Frankel and Korie's Musical Doll and The Civilians' Nobody's Lunch Invited to 2005 Sundance Lab in Florida" playbill.com, October 25, 2005 Doll was awarded the Richard Rogers Development Award in 1994."Richard Rodgers Awards for Musical Theater" artsandletters.org, accessed April 26, 2015 It was developed at the Sundance Musical Theater Lab, and was staged in 2003 at Chicago's Ravinia Festival, directed by Lonny Price, with a cast featuring Michael Cerveris and David Hyde Pierce.Gans, Andrew. "Michael Cerveris Replaces Brian d'Arcy James in Ravinia's Doll" playbill.com, August 5, 2003
Grey Gardens The team's best-known work, Grey Gardens, is the first musical to have been based on a documentary—the Albert and David Maysles documentary of the same name. With a book by playwright Doug Wright, Grey Gardens expanded upon the period documented in the film — Little Edie and Big Edie Beale living in a crumbling and decrepit mansion in East Hampton — by adding a hypothesized first act which imagined the engagement reception of Little Edie and Joseph Kennedy Jr., at the mansion in its heyday thirty years before. Of making a musical out of a documentary, Korie was quoted as saying, “unlike in a movie, in the theater there are no close-ups. Music and lyrics provide an actor with the equivalent of a close-up on the screen, a defining gesture that stops time and glimpses momentarily into the soul.”"Interview: Tim Sanford and Scott Frankel, Richard Greenberg, and Michael Korie" Playwrights Horizons. Accessed 27 February 2015.
Grey Gardens opened on February 10, 2006, at Playwrights Horizons with direction by Michael Greif and a cast featuring Christine Ebersole, Mary Louise Wilson, and John McMartin, later transferring to Broadway. The musical won an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Musical, was nominated for ten Tony Awards (including Best Musical), and was cited as Time Magazine’s #1 New Show of the Year for 2006-2007. In his essays on the show in The Best Plays Theater Yearbook, 2006-2007, Michael Feingold characterizes Korie’s lyrics as "...couched in a diction that shifts recklessly from high to low and past to present...Grey Gardens’s lyrics convey an eccentric sensibility wholly their own, mirroring the two heroines’ eccentricity."Feingold, Michael. Grey Gardens. "The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2005-2006", ed. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins. New York: Limelight Editions, 2007, p. 49 Since its premiere, Grey Gardens has received numerous productions both in the U.S. and abroad in Japan, Brazil, and Australia. The New York Times cited the song "Another Winter in a Summer Town" as one that should be included in the standard American musical theater repertoire.Holden, Stephen. "Setting New Standards: American Songbook Reshapes the Canon" The New York Times, January 22, 2015 The original Broadway cast recording was released by PS Classics in 2007.
In the summer of 2015, the work made its East Hampton Premiere at the Bay Street Theater, directed by Michael Wilson. Starring Rachel York and Betty Buckley, the production was subsequently presented by the Center Theatre Group at Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theatre in the summer of 2016. Also in 2016, the musical had its European premiere at London's Southwark Playhouse, starring Olivier award-winning actresses Sheila Hancock and Jenna Russell, and directed by Thom Southerland. Writing for theartsdesk.com, Matt Wolf commented that “the portrait of a party gone spectacularly sour works very well in its own right and allows in practical terms for Russell to dazzle as both mother in act one and her own daughter in act two– a gift of a dual assignment that Russell bats out of the park....Grey Gardens' singular achievement is to seem absolutely and bracingly unique.”Wolf, Matt. "Grey Gardens, Southwark Playhouse" The Arts Desk, January 10, 2016 The production received the 2017 Offie for “Best Musical of the Year”.Bowie-Sell, Daisy. "Winners of the Offies announced" WhatsOnStage, February 26, 2017
The Grapes of Wrath