Editor’s note: This story is part of The Dallas Morning News’ coverage of the 2024 total solar eclipse. For more, visit dallasnews.com/eclipse.
Before he was commissioned to write a musical about the 1878 solar eclipse, composer Michael John LaChiusa says, his interest in the astronomical phenomenon was “absolutely none.”
That changed when he read David Baron’s book American Eclipse, which chronicles the expeditions of three scientists who traveled to Colorado and Wyoming in July 1878 to witness the total solar eclipse.
“I was immediately smitten with the book,” LaChiusa says in a phone interview from New York.
Next month, his musical American Eclipse is receiving two concert performances at Baylor University in Waco on April 7, the day before a total solar eclipse plunges Waco into darkness for a little over 4 minutes.
Broadway actors Mary Testa, Marc Kudisch, Rachel Bay Jones and Sydney James Harcourt are flying in to play the major roles. Theater students will make up the ensemble. The event includes a conversation with LaChiusa, Baron and director Bill Rauch.
Like Baron, LaChiusa became fascinated with the human side of the story and what it said about the state of the American experiment at the time.
“Coming off of the Civil War, we were looked down upon by other nations,” LaChiusa says. “This was a great opportunity to demonstrate our prowess.”
American Eclipse: A New Musical depicts not just the book’s main characters — asteroid hunter James Craig Watson, Vassar astronomer and feminist Maria Mitchell and young inventor Thomas Edison — but also other people from that time.
They include Ute Indian chief Colorow, his three wives and son Tabernash, who was killed by a sheriff’s deputy later in the year; Watson’s wife Annette, who traveled with him on his investigations; and Mitchell’s students and sister Phebe, who later compiled her letters and journals.
“Because I write theater, I was looking for characters and drama,” LaChiusa says. “What I found in David’s book were a lot of wonderful doors and windows open to me as a writer to invent.
What does it mean for us when we realize the country is a lot bigger than we thought and we have a lot of people that have to live together? It was a big crisis point in America.”
Scientifically, the 1878 eclipse was a bust. Watson had hoped to prove the existence of a planet closer to the sun than Mercury called Vulcan. Edison brought his newly minted tasimeter device, intended to measure minute temperature changes in the heat emitted by the sun’s corona.
“He wanted to prove that he wasn’t just a maker of gadgets, as he called himself, that he was as good a thinker and scientist as anybody else,” LaChiusa says. But Edison’s experiment failed. “Probably the most significant thing,” LaChiusa says, “was Maria Mitchell’s expedition, the one that showed women can make the same journey as men.”
Stylistically, LaChiusa, who wrote the music, lyrics and libretto for American Eclipse, was inspired by stage and film melodramas of the late 19th century — “the heroine tied to the railroad tracks” — particularly Augustin Daly’s 1867 play Under the Gaslight.
“There’s that epic sweep of Americana in post Civil War-era theater,” he says, “that I embraced as a template for the telling of the story.”
Details
April 7 at 1:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. at Jones Theatre, 60 Baylor Ave., Waco. $45-$75. baylortheatre.evenue.net.
:no_upscale()/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/VV3O77J4DBH5RPTY2DSA3U4GGU.jpg)
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/F5S2YSWWSFDL5ETVPWMAR4IIMM.jpg)
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/XVPEQJX4SRGT7OSHUVAKN5FFGQ.jpg)
:no_upscale()/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/FVNFZF773ZGBBIMFHTQJFFNT2Y.jpg)
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/D4FJ726DTR6SREKVO4SCKYKNEE.jpg)