More than any new score I've heard recently, it wants unplugging... The piece moved into an opera company's repertoire, where we could relish LaChiusa's musicianly composing, and the niceties of Jonathan Tunick's delicate scoring... Audra McDonald dives into the title role and carries it as easily as if Brünnhilde and Boris Godunov together would be a mere day's work to her. But this can't go on forever; she's an artist, not a dray horse. She gets strong support from Darius de Haas as her wastrel brother, and from delicious Mary Testa, as the local dragon chariot.

What do women want, at the end of the millennium? In Michael John LaChiusa's Marie Christine, the apparent answer is that they want today's challenges a century early. A version of the Medea story set in 1890s America... Proficient, skilled, and imaginative, LaChiusa marshals an enormous panoply of approaches to tell his tale...

...At times this last Broadway musical of the 20th century seems to contain every mode of music theater the century has tried, from the Stravinskyan fanfare that starts its prelude to the Schoenbergian (or maybe Boublil-Schonbergian) chorale that sends the heroine to death in a blaze of glory. In between, the ghosts of Puccini and Gershwin, Britten and Copland, Kern and Sondheim and Weill and Poulenc come and go in the gloom. LaChiusa's never literal in his derivations; he just has an acute ear and a fin de siècle omnivore's taste.