It concerns a group of friends living in New York City, one of whom, Charlotte, decides to stop smoking and then swims to compensate for the lack of nicotine.
Directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, it starred Jennifer Laura Thompson in the lead role of Charlotte and featured Hugh Panaro as Robert, Lea DeLaria as Cinder, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Marco.
Alice Ripley starred, with Gregory Jbara and Chad Kimball, in a production running from October 9, 2007, to November 18, 2007, at The Blank Theatre, Hollywood, California.
Charlotte's tale emerges in vignettes that flicker and flash, zooming back and forth in time, held together by a narrative thread as tenuous as her nonsmoking sanity."
"[5] Ben Brantley, reviewing for the New York Times, wrote: "About halfway into its intermissionless 90 minutes, Little Fish starts to lose its shapely, sharp-edged contours and turn into a sentimental, well, blob... Mr. LaChiusa...and Ms. Daniele has done a swell job of fashioning a lively musical about what it means to feel lifeless in contemporary Manhattan...Like many American musical composers under 50, Mr. LaChiusa is an artistic descendant of Mr. Sondheim, and in many ways, Little Fish can be regarded as a direct, latter-day answer to Company.
Certainly, Riccardo Hernández's terraced, silver-toned set, with its evocation of concrete canyons enhanced by Peggy Eisenhauer's shifting lighting, brings to mind Boris Aronson's fabled designs for the original Company.