2003-06-22
The Dallas Morning News
Lawson Taitte
NEW YORK – Musical theater composers used to groom their shows out of town before taking them to Broadway. Now the country’s best new theater composers aren’t sure they want to go to Broadway at all. They feel they can be more creative and more original someplace else – maybe anyplace else.
Take Adam Guettel. His Floyd Collins has earned him cult status among critics and younger audiences all over the country. Student composers talk about him in reverent tones. But Floyd Collins had only the briefest of runs off-Broadway in New York, and the musical about a trapped cave explorer met with a mixed-to-hostile critical reception there.
Mr. Guettel happens to be Richard Rodgers’ grandson and the son of Mary Rodgers, whose Once Upon a Mattress established her as a major Broadway composer. He admits that family ties would make it easy to put a show on Broadway. But he wrote his new musical, The Light in the Piazza, to premiere this month at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre – to be followed by a run next season at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.
"I think it’s a candle-in-the-dark situation," Mr. Guettel says. "Much in the way that an oppressed culture can express itself, I can write the music I want to write since I don’t have to worry about how it will be received [by Broadway critics]. I don’t have to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. There is life outside New York."
Mr. Guettel is frequently grouped with three other composers – Michael John LaChiusa, Ricky Ian Gordon and Jason Robert Brown. All burst into national prominence as the creators of the songs that diva Audra McDonald sang on her 1998 CD, her first hit for Nonesuch Records, Way Back to Paradise.
In the musical theater’s constant tug of war between the poles of pop music and opera, these musicians lean to the operatic side. They take their plots seriously and want to create real human characters and emotions. They write harmonically adventurous scores.
Mr. Brown comes more from the pop side than the others, while Mr. Gordon is an acknowledged classical composer. (He has written for Houston Grand Opera, Mr. LaChiusa for Chicago Lyric Opera.) But only Mr. Gordon inhabits two worlds: classical and theater. The others sit squarely in the middle of the great tradition of American musical theater, and they are its most promising lights for the future, along with allies such as Jeanine Tesori and Andrew Lippa.
All four put new projects before the public this spring. Mr. Guettel’s Piazza has won warm reviews, if not raves, in Seattle. Mr. LaChiusa’s Little Fish and Mr. Gordon’s My Life With Albertine debuted off-Broadway to negative notices. Mr. Brown wrote six songs for Urban Cowboy and directed the music for it on Broadway. His contribution was largely ignored in the dismissive reviews, though he did get a joint nomination for a Tony Award along with others who contributed tunes.
So what do the New York critics think?
In his review of Mr. LaChiusa’s Little Fish, Variety‘s Charles Isherwood suggested that Deborah Eisenberg, the short-story writer on whose work the musical was based, "remove her good name from this turkey." Critic John Heilpern wrote in The New York Observer, "Mr. LaChiusa is a well-known disciple of Stephen Sondheim, but that’s no excuse. … I say it’s spinach and the heck with it."
New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel, who has provoked a lot of comment lately with his vitriolic pen, wrote on March 19: "Two critics, just before the curtain went up on Ricky Ian Gordon’s excruciatingly boring Proust musical, My Life With Albertine. First critic: ‘Only three minutes to go.’ Second critic: ‘Et puis, l’eternite. [And then, eternity.]’ "
This kind of reception has caused a discouragement that borders on despair.
It seems to the more adventurous composers that New York wants nothing more than light fare, like the last three Tony-winning musicals (The Producers, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Hairspray). Broadway attendance was up more than 4 percent in the year ended May 31, even as the average ticket price went up about $5, producers say, suggesting that theatergoers are finding plenty to like in the current atmosphere.
"People’s expectations of a musical are limited. People are so closed off," Mr. LaChiusa says. "Spending your money on something new or experimental is considered foolhardy in our culture right now.
"Little Fish would have been much more of a success here if I had put a fat man in a dress in it, or songs they already knew."
If Mr. LaChiusa’s allusions to Hairspray and Thoroughly Modern Millie smack of bitterness, it may be justified. He had two shows up for that honor in 2000 – The Wild Party and Marie Christine – and lost to Contact, which was performed to old recordings of Rossini and Benny Goodman.
"It’s really sad what the New York critics are doing to musical theater," Mr. Gordon says. "All I can say is that it is very, very painful. Sometimes this world is not ready for beauty to be born."
Mr. Brown, the only one of these composers with a new show on Broadway this year (Urban Cowboy almost closed its second night, though it finally managed to hold on a few weeks longer), was there almost by accident. He had decided to get out of the composing business.
"I was just not able to make a living doing what I wanted to do, and it was not healthy for me," Mr. Brown says. "I took a teaching job in Boston, and I really thought, ‘I’m OK with this. I don’t want to be fighting anymore.’ "
Then the director of Urban Cowboy called and persuaded him to come into the show during Florida tryouts.
Record producer Tommy Krasker says, "I don’t think Jason would be happy in academe very long. He’s much too addicted to the stage."
Still, the prospect is a chilling one: The one young composer to win a Tony for a serious musical in recent years (Parade in 1999) might leave the business.
"If you are putting up a show that is serious in intent, I understand why critics might be wary or suspicious, but not hostile, as these have been," says Mr. Krasker, who produced that original Audra McDonald album and has since co-founded the PS Classics label, in large part to give composers like these a voice.
"I always look on the bright side of things. We have to look beyond the initial reception," Mr. Krasker adds. "They’re finding wonderful opportunities with other companies. The truth of it is that throughout history, there have been composers who have been more welcomed and less welcomed. Think of Vernon Duke [who wrote April in Paris]. He was never a critical favorite. He never had many hits. But the work has endured. People will know those songs in the next century."
Mr. Gordon says he shares that long-term view. He notes that recordings have propagated interest in his and his fellow composers’ music and spawned regional productions. ("Floyd Collins would never have had all those productions without its Nonesuch recording," he says.) He notes that he and the others keep getting commissions from nonprofit theaters and the occasional opera company.
"The truth is, mediocrity doesn’t last. Cream rises to the top," Mr. Gordon says. <
"We have an audience, and I firmly believe it would be a large audience if people would go to see the shows for themselves. Sondheim [the musical ancestor of all four composers] was not supposed to be an aberration. He was supposed to be a precedent."
Mr. Guettel, who says that The Light in the Piazza was always intended to be a chamber work unsuitable for Broadway, admits he can even imagine a triumphal return to his home city – under the proper circumstances.
"I would love it to have a life in New York," he says. "If we come in to New York with a good production and find just the right space for it, it could happen. But I would oppose it in any other circumstances."
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