Energizing The American Musical -- Jeanine Tesori And Other Composers Strike Up The Show Tunes Again

------------------------------- Theater preview

"Violet" previews tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday, opens Thursday and plays Tuesdays-Sundays through Nov. 15, at A Contemporary Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle; $10-$38, 206-292-7676. -------------------------------

Maybe we should just call it quits with the Great American Musical. Just officially declare over that golden era when vibrant, crowd-pleasing, original musicals regularly turned up at theaters everywhere.

Well, not so fast, say some younger theatrical composers who are just starting to flex their creative muscles and breathe fresh oxygen into a seemingly exhausted form.

One of those hopefuls is Jeanine Tesori, an intensely committed yet easygoing New York composer of 36.

Tesori created the well-praised, highly eclectic incidental music for a recent Lincoln Center version of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," which starred Helen Hunt and aired on public television. She also devised the twangy score for the award-winning 1997 Off Broadway show "Violet," a homespun tale of faith and self-esteem now making its West Coast debut at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. And later, her music will grace a Broadway-bound tuner based on the 1967 film flapper comedy "Thoroughly Modern Millie," a vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg.

No doubt about it, Tesori is hot. And she's not the only emerging theater composer in demand. Adam Guettel, Michael John La Chiusa and Jason Robert Brown are all under 40, and all are busy composing new works backed by high-powered producers. Brown's "Parade" opens at Lincoln Center this season in a staging by veteran musical director Harold Prince. La Chiusa and Guettel have recent Off Broadway credits, and both were jointly commissioned by Chicago's Goodman Theatre and the Lyric Opera to contrive new works for the year 2000.

Will these composers recharge, and find a broad audience for, a medium that has steadily lost its clout and glimmer in recent decades?

"It's not our mission to revive anything, but to do our own work," said Tesori one recent morning at ACT, where she and "Violet's" lyricist and book author, Brian Crawley, were helping to refine the show.

"When we got out of college there wasn't much going on with musicals. So we had the freedom to venture out into new territory."

Susan H. Schulman, director of "Violet" in New York and Seattle and the "Sound of Music" revival on Broadway, thinks the new turks are "a great, exciting group of composers." And where does she think the American musical is heading?

"I don't think it's headed anywhere, and that's why it's exciting," she laughs. "It's going ahead, it's going up and down and backwards. These artists are not ignoring the classic rules for musicals, they're just expanding them."

Tesori's collaborator Crawley is just as bullish on his peer pod.

"We're all writing interesting, accessible pieces, and I think we can pick up the mantle that was dropped over the last 10 or 15 years, when people were just in despair about the future of musicals."

Spotlight shifts from musicals

However, the work of these up-and-comers remains obscure to the majority of musical theater fans. And musicals are no longer, to quote critic Ethan Morrden, "central to American culture." In his new book, "Coming Up Roses," Morrden writes of a time when show tunes "not only topped the Hit Parade, but unlike most pop music, often passed into classic status."

That era began to fade in the '60s and '70s, as rock music swept the pop charts, movies and TV dominated the Zeitgeist, and the standard musical comedy formulas grew stale.

Now and then, a tuner does reach pop-cult status - i.e., "Hair," "A Chorus Line," the bold experiments of Stephen Sondheim, such brand-name "events" as "The Lion King."

And yearly, a scattering of new, small-scaled works are tried out in smaller venues, such as the local Village and Annex theaters.

But Broadway, the record industry and the mass audience seem to want high-concept, imported spectacles and "safe" revivals, not fresh, inventive "book" musicals.

Is all that about to change, now that Tesori and peers are up to bat?

Optimists will point to "Rent," by the late Jonathan Larson, as a '90s Broadway hit that fuses new and old sensibilities successfully.

Probably more typical of the new breed of New York theater composers, however, is Tesori. Working from a broad musical palette, influenced as much by world- and roots idioms as by the arty Sondheim and populist Rodgers canons, she's compiled a small, touted body of work that's yet to have national exposure.

And unlike her older colleagues, Tesori didn't grow up with "Oklahoma" and "Chorus Line." She discovered such "classics" only after dropping out of pre-med studies at Barnard College, reviving a long-dormant musical talent and becoming a pit conductor for "The Secret Garden" and other Broadway shows.

"I've taken great, even profound inspiration from the old shows by Rodgers and Hammerstein and others," she says. "But I also know that period is over, and it should be."

For Tesori, staying musically open and flexible, avoiding "an umbrella approach" and a signature style, is essential.

Her first score, for the short-lived off Broadway piece "Galileo," drew on classical influences. For "Violet," which she initiated with Crawley in 1993, the folksy subject matter led to sonic tapestry rich in gospel, bluegrass and country-folk sounds.

Based on the Doris Betts short story "The Ugliest Pilgrim" (which also inspired an Oscar-winning short film), "Violet" depicts a young North Carolina woman's journey to find a faith healer who'll make her disfiguring scar disappear. En route, she meets strangers who help teach her the real meaning of beauty.

Though it would have been off-beat source material for a musical in earlier eras, the fable entranced Tesori. "It was such an interesting story about exterior healing and interior healing. Women's roles in musicals are so narrow, and I'd never seen a woman like Violet on stage before."

For research, Tesori consulted with Nashville musicians she knew, steeped herself in gospel music and visited Southern churches.

The show premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 1997, starring Lauren Ward (also in ACT's version), with music direction by Tesori's conductor husband Michael Rafter. Reviews were mixed but encouraging. Newsday praised it as "a lovely piece" that "uses Southern popular and folk influences with unpredictable sophistication and flair." The New York Times also admired her music, but complained the story "said nothing more than that beauty is only skin deep."

Despite such reservations, "Violet" won the coveted Richard Rodgers and Gilman Gonzales-Falla prizes and a New York critics' award as best musical of 1997.

And Tesori moved on, to Nicholas Hytner's "timeless, placeless" staging of "Twelfth Night." Her dreamy score for the show incorporates Tibetan bells, Indian drums, banjo, cello and other diverse sounds.

Now she seems just as happy toiling on the blatantly commercial "Thoroughly Modern Millie," because "it's a great story in a period, the 1920s, that's a lot of fun. And Whoopi is very cool to work with."

Tesori's creations will get greater exposure soon, through CDs and more regional stagings of "Violet."

ACT artistic director Gordon Edelstein says he's delighted to present the West Coast premiere of the show. And he wants to foster the emergence of future original musicals at ACT. "We have a generation of extraordinarily gifted musical theater artists now who love the traditional music theater form, but are determined to make it their own," he says. "I want to work with them."

But the question remains: Will audiences want to hum along?