Liberace has come to be synonymous with a certain brand of popular entertainment long on corn, heavy on hokum, frothing over with spectacle, and usually featuring an overornamented, shamelessly extroverted male odalisque. Little Richard comes to mind, as well as the latter-day Elvis Presley and the Elton John of the early 70s–all of them decorated like Christmas trees and about the same size. Little Wladziu Valentino Liberace from West Allis, Wisconsin, was the original, though, turning the piano lessons forced on him by a doting mother and a frustrated classical-musician father into an empire of ego and excess that makes Donald Trump look like Mahatma Gandhi. Now, a bare five years after his death, Milwaukee’s Theatre X has assembled a team of creative artists that includes Chicago composer Michael Vitali and painter Ed Paschke to put together Liberace: The Magic of Believing, an opera tracing the life of the great showman.
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“We had just finished a project based on the writings of George F. Kennan [a Milwaukeean who was the American ambassador to Russia following World War II], and we were thinking in this ‘local hero/local antihero’ mode. It was one of those meetings where everyone was throwing ideas around–I remember Pam [Woodruff] saying ‘opera,’ and then somebody said, ‘Liberace,’ and we all sort of giggled.”
Paschke didn’t giggle–he immediately agreed to design what turned out to be no less than 20 backdrops for the production. Vitali didn’t giggle, either. “The sheer scale of Liberace’s life,” he says, “the strangeness and perversity of it–it’s natural for opera. Mere dialogue can’t express it, and where language stops, music starts. It took me about half a second to say yes.”
“There was a public and a private side to Liberace, and in many ways the public side was the real Liberace,” says Vitali. “I can fault the man for many things, but not for the depth of his ambition. Presley was a pawn of his managers, but Liberace orchestrated his own life to such a degree that he got exactly what he wanted. He was an American archetype.”
