Michael Korie

Michael Korie

Michael Korie 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.

Korie was born April 1, 1955 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. After graduating from Teaneck High School in 1972, 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.

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. 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".

...
Wikipedia