"Michael John LaChiusa has done it again. Bernarda Alba is fascinating, riveting, vibrant, and exciting."
— Steven Suskind, Playbill
"A serious and seamless musicalization... shows off LaChiusa's native strengths: his grasp of the living rhythms of theatrical language, which pervades not only his music and lyrics but his expert shaping of the libretto; his eagerness to cut directly to the dark, despairing marrow of his material; and his raw, almost Gothic sensuality."
— Rob Kendt,
Broadway.com"Not just a good musical or a great musical, but a musical for the ages. That impossibly rare thing: an engrossing musical drama, so superbly integrated that all boundaries between speech, music, and dance blur and dissolve before your eyes... Like all great adaptations it eclipses its source.
Bernarda Alba brings to arresting theatrical life the soul of Lorca's compact emotional epic in a way that will make it impossible to ever look at the original the same way again.”
— Matthew Murray,
TalkinBroadway.com“Michael John LaChiusa has finally composed the impeccable tuner that cognoscenti have been awaiting with waning patience. .. this 90-minute, intermissionless compression of the hothouse play is absolutely stunning in every possible category.”
— David Finkle,
Theatermania"It's even possible that, just as it's now difficult to watch George Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion without hearing the songs that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote for
My Fair Lady, Michael John LaChiusa's
Bernarda Alba will become more popular in this country than Lorca's grim, impassioned play. That's how powerful a work of art it is.”
— David Finkle,
Theatermania