Lucky Nurse

Following its recent success with old musicals, the multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre now presents for a limited run of Sunday concert performances, Lucky Nurse and Other Short Musical Plays, an early work by the hottest composer on Broadway, Michael John LaChiusa.

Lucky Nurse and Other Short Musical Plays were first performed together in 1991 at Playwrights Horizons with a cast of Broadway stars including Tony Award winner Chuck Cooper. Since then Broadway’s finest talents (including Toni Collette, Idina Menzel, Mandy Patinkin and Audra MacDonald) have beaten a path to Michael John LaChiusa’s door – drawn by his ability to explore quirky and engaging situations through incisive lyrics and beautiful music.

Lucky Nurse and Other Short Musical Plays contains four plays about little people engaging with big issues. It begins with Break, in which two construction workers achieve new insight into their lunch hour woes when the Virgin Mary appears to them in an accidental visitation. Next comes Agnes. Deserted in her wheelchair while her nurse goes shopping, Agnes tells a stranger how she longs for paradise – and asks him to send her there. In Eulogy For Mister Hamm, various residents of a hostel are queuing to use the one available bathroom when they discover that their superintendent may be dead. Finally, Lucky Nurse takes us on a journey through the events that link the lives of four world-weary strangers on a single night in the city.