The Influence of Stephen Sondheim on Adam Guettel

[Sumofallthings]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 12:17am

I have been reading an excellent Sondheim biography and in it they describe teh relationship of Mary Rodgers (daughter of Richard Rodgers of Rodgers and Hammerstein) to Stephen Sondheim. They were extremely close, even on some accounts, engaged despite Sondheims homosexuality. Then the engagement fell through and eventually Mary Rodgers married a man named (correct me if I'm wrong) Harry Guettel. They then produced the heir apparent to the Sondheim throne Adam Guettel.

I am looking to discuss not only the musical but also relationship influences that Sondheim has had with the young Adam Guettel. Anyone care to shed some light?

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 12:26am

In a link to an article last someone posted last week, Adam Guettel indicated that in his home they rarely listened to his grandfather's work or "Steve's music." Obviously, a close friendship exists for him to refer to Sondheim by first name like that, but as you have indicated, he knew him from his earliest years. Mary Rodgers has mentioned in more than one account that if Stephen Sondheim were not gay she would have married him, and he has made essentially the same point in his biography. Obviously their friendship has remained strong since that time.

Unfortunately, I am not personally acquainted with any of the above parties and can only speculate. I would assume that Sondheim and Guettel have had a number of conversations about writing and finding your voice and pursuing your own path. Adam Guettel has been pretty open about his battle with drug addictions and his inability to feel genuine in
pursuing a career in rock music, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he turned to Sondheim for advice on his future from time to time, as well as for validation of his abilities. I sure would if I had access to the man.

[feinstein9]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 12:31am

just out of curiousity, is it the meryle secrest book?

[Sumofallthings]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 12:38am

Yep! What a gorgeous and exquisitely written biography, one of the best I've ever read. It deals quite fearlessly with the topic of homosexuality which is a welcome relief from dreck like Delovely.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 12:52am

There was an extended profile of Guettel in the Times Magazine about two years ago or so, that you would find quite interesting (it's in the Times archives -- I wanted to link it for you, but I checked and you have to pay for the article at this point). In it, it was clear that Guettel and Sondheim had/have an almost a quasi-godson to godfather/ mentee to mentor relationship.... and a friendship . It also was VERY frank about his drug problems, relationship issues etc..... that took up much of his time in his 20s and 30s.

In the article, Guettel described some of his earliest efforts at songwriting (while he was still in his late teens or early 20s, I believe) which his mother, family members and friends all thought were remarkable and wonderfully promising and which they simply heaped praise on him with no criticism for. But when he played them for "Uncle Steve," Sondheim, while encouraging, immediately began giving constructive criticism of the writing, what did work, what didn't work, what needed sharpening and clarifying and what he need to go and work on. Guettel said that it crushed his ego a little bit at the time -- he had been the "golden boy" and no one had ever told him he wasn't perfect before. But, in time, he came to understand and appreciate the advice that Sondheim had given him. It was very much the way that Oscar Hammerstein II had mentored the young Sondheim a generation before and Sondheim was merely trying to pass on the tricks of the trade to his young charge. He was treating him as an equal, rather than as a pampered son and in time he came to really be grateful for and rely on his advice.

If I'm not mistaken, Guettel later played the full scores for "Floyd Collins" and "Saturn Returns" for Sondheim prior to them going into production. And in the article (I think it was the same article), Guettel talked about playing an early version of the score of "Light in the Piazza" for Sondheim, and him critiquing it, song by song, line by line -- again what worked, what didn't etc.... Some things he adored, some things he wasn't crazy about and he gave his suggestions for improvements. It's clear that Sondheim treats him as a treasured colleague (as well as a friend and "godson") -- so much so that a few years back when Sondheim named a list of "The Songs I Wish I Had Written" in honor of his 70th Birthday, he included Guettel's "Riddle Song" from FLOYD COLLINS.

It's truly a remarkable relationship that exists between the two of them. Perhaps, it's time for the Times (or The Sondheim Review or some other publication) to explore it more fully.

Updated On: 6/10/05 at 12:52 AM

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:05am

Once again, Margo comes through and takes all the things I've read and actually articulates them coherently.

This is a good time to be asking these questions. You can find some good things scattered about the web these days, such as the articles mentioned above. I remember Googling (or was it Yahoo) the term "Adam Guettel" in 1997 and getting virtually nothing. What a wonderful world we live in!

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:08am

This subject is also part of the reason I thought of pairing their songs together on a compilation CD, which we discussed (not very fully) in this thread:

https://forum.broadwayworld.com/readmessage.cfm?boardname=bway&thread=853384#1118439

I have about $5 credit on the Times website, so if I can find the article I'll spring for it and share.
Updated On: 6/10/05 at 01:08 AM

[MusicMan]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:23am

Guettel will need to establish a track record of critical and/or commercial success before he merits this kind of puff piece. Until then, journalists will have no choice but to regurgitate the same old Sondheim-Hammerstein parallels.

Updated On: 5/1/08 at 01:23 AM

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:37am

Well, it took me three tries to find the right article, so now I've blown a good $10 on NY Times articles about Adam Guettel, all of which I believe I've read but didn't bother to hold onto before. PM me if you'd like to see them. Sumofallthings, they're already coming your way.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:51am

Guettel has gotten his Times "puff" piece already -- merited or not. "Floyd Collins" and now "The Light in the Piazza" both qualify as at least a "critical" successes at this point, what with PIAZZA receiving Best Score and Orchestrations from both the Drama Desks, along with three other awards, and the Tonys, along with four other awards. He's only worked in the not-for-profit realm, thus far, so he's yet to test the commercial waters, but I'm quite sure Lincoln Center Theatre views PIAZZA as a "financial success" within its terms (their longest-running hit since CONTACT), but, besides that, since when was commercial success the determinant for what merits press coverage in terms of theatre? If that were the case, then MAMMA MIA would merit a major new Times write-up every six months for the last several years.

Rather than "regurgitating" 60 year old stories about Sondheim and Hammerstein, wouldn't it be nice for journalists to create a few new pieces discussing the influence of the old master Sondheim upon a new-ish, young (-ish) up-and-coming, Tony Award winning composer? I'm not saying that it will sell papers (what, theatre-wise, does these days?), but it certainly would fulfill the Times' stated commitment to covering new and important trends and issues within the Arts.

Updated On: 7/5/05 at 01:51 AM

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:53am

I think I'm in love with him.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 1:54am

Sorry, Munk, he's straight - but, he's certainly first-rate crush material.

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 2:01am

I agree with Margo, as usual. Every article that is written about Adam Guettel, or Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Ricky Ian Gordan, etc. inevitably mentions the influence of Sondheim on this "crop" of writers, but Guettel has had an unprecedented level of personal access to Sondheim.

I'd read a "puff piece" on Sondheim tutoring a brick, so you can bet I'd be all over a piece about him mentoring my favorite composer.

[MusicMan]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 3:13am

"...wouldn't it be nice for journalists to create a few new pieces discussing the influence of the old master Sondheim upon a new-ish, young (-ish) up-and-coming, Tony Award winning composer? I'm not saying that it will sell papers (what, theatre-wise, does these days?), but it certainly would fulfill the Times' stated commitment to covering new and important trends and issues within the Arts."

They've been doing that with every Sondheim wanna-be with a show about to open for the last 10 years +. The last thing a Times subscriber (or anyone else for that matter) wants to read is the latest gripe from one of the up-and-comers that the audience just doesn't "get it" and what they do is too good for the average man or, bless us and save us, they had to bust up their chiffarobe and sell it for kindling in order to survive.






--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Updated On: 5/1/08 at 03:13 AM

[jam_man]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 3:34am

I really do hope Guettel is next in line. If you think about it, the American Musical has mostly been headed by a select few, or a Master and Apprentice sort of way (sorry, I've had a lot of Star Wars recently). It was virtually created a good bit by Oscar Hammerstein, and he passed the torch to Sondheim. In turn, Sondheim has tryed to pass it for a while (though I CERTIANTLY hope his isn't done yet, though it looks like he may be). Jonathan Larson very easily could have been the guy, were it not for his untimly death.


If I may continue with Star Wars terms, maybe Adam Guettel is The Choosen One!

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 4:23am

"The last thing a Times subscriber (or anyone else for that matter) wants to read is the latest gripe from one of the up-and-comers that the audience just doesn't "get it" and what they do is too good for the average man and, bless us and save us, they had to bust up their chiffarobe and sell it for kindling in order to survive. Spare me."

And you've heard or read such a quote from Adam Guettel somewhere, MusicMan? About him selling kindling in order to survive? Please cite your source -- I'd love to see it.

Oops..... oh, sorry, guess you can't. Know why? Because he's NEVER ever said such a thing or had a reason to -- as you well know. We were specifically discussing Adam Guettel here -- not anyone else. Try and focus.

Is there some reason that you are so ALWAYS so incredibly negative regarding every single composer under the age of 70, or even older and still alive, but working in the contemporary musical theatre and striving to make their way in an already hostile marketplace?

Why does it bother you so much that some of us actually really like and enjoy the work of Adam Guettel, Jeanine Tesori, Jason Robert Brown and others creating new scores for the musical theatre?

Does it somehow offend you that anyone could actually appreciate and love their work when you don't?

Can I just say that those "older" scores that you love and champion? I, and most of the rest of us who love Guettel, Tesori et al, love and champion them as well. We own the cast albums, we've loved them since childhood and continue to do so to this day. They were brilliant then and are still brilliant now. This isn't an either/or situation. The fact is, though, that the folks that wrote those scores are dead now, or are no longer turning out new scores. Times change, music evolves and I still want to hear new scores for the musical theatre and, guess what? There are some extremely talented people writing scores for the modern musical theatre.

Why do you always seem so angry/frustrated that some of us want to support them?

Updated On: 6/10/05 at 04:23 AM

[Link Larkin Wanabe]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 5:14am

Right now I am trying to build up my repetoire, from the two musicals I am writing, so that I can send a CD of my stuff to some up and coming young composers, so I can have a basis for a mentor relationship. I would love Adam ro Jason Robert Brown to critique my work, mostly because my stuff is NOT in their style. I wonder, however, if artists that young would actually feel that they are ready to pass on their knowledge at this point in their lives, but I hope so, because I believe that the whole Mentor-Apprentice system is what can keep the musical theatre genre alive and healthy, rather than degenerating into a state of Juke-Box musicals (not that I don't think they can be done well, but young composers/lyricists are not supported this way).

Akiva

[Ourtime992]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 2:10pm

Link Larkin, another good person to contact for critique is Peter Filichia. While not a composer, he certainly knows the craft well, especially lyrics and character, and he has been very gracious with his time to listen and critique work by young writers in the past.

I'm not entirely sure that there is or has to be one composer to take up the mantle. While Guettel is my personal favorite among the composers to emerge in the last decade or so, I'm awfully fond of Jenine Tesori (Violet in particular, as well as Caroline or Change), Jason Robert Brown (Parade still speaks to me as one of the finest scores around with nary a weak spot in it), and Michael John LaChiusa (the Wild Party and Marie Christine in one season!). At the same time, I'm a big fan of David Yazbek, even though he is often placed at the other end of the spectrum and not thrown in with the "arty" bunch. I'd be thrilled to see a world where all of them thrive on Broadway and regularly produce new material. One can never get too many cast albums, after all.

But as I've said, what differentiates Guettel from the others is that he has not only been influenced by listening to and studying Sondheim's work, he has known the man since he was a baby, has had in-depth conversations about the art form, and has had his work critiqued, line by line, by the man.

[robbiej]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 2:28pm

One of the major problems facing young composers these days is the lack of truly visionary directors to help shape the work. Had Bennett not died, had Tommy Tune continued on his path as a spectacular director, these young(ish) composers would have the benefit of working with people who know how to create a show for a modern audience and make it both artistically worthy and commercially viable. George C. Wolfe, who is probably the closest we've got right now, still misses as often as he hits (particularly with a more structured, 'old-fashioned' type of musical).

Sondheim learned his craft from Hammerstein, but it was the influence of Robbins and Prince (and Bennett) that really shaped the form-shattering breakthroughs for which he's credited.

[MusicMan]

Posted: 6/10/05 at 9:39pm

"Can I just say that those "older" scores that you love and champion? I, and most of the rest of us who love Guettel, Tesori et al, love and champion them as well. We own the cast albums, we've loved them since childhood and continue to do so to this day. They were brilliant then and are still brilliant now. This isn't an either/or situation. The fact is, though, that the folks that wrote those scores are dead now, or are no longer turning out new scores. Times change, music evolves and I still want to hear new scores for the musical theatre and, guess what? There are some extremely talented people writing scores for the modern musical theatre.
Why do you always seem so angry/frustrated that some of us want to support them?"

Margo, it doesn't matter to me whether you or anyone else supports them or not. But as far as I'm concerned, your "extremely talented" people have yet to demonstrate that they have the 'gift.' It's that simple. I love musical theatre far too much to be much impressed by the next new thing. There are plenty of posters on this board, including yourself, who are happy to be cheerleaders. Be my guest. If I feel differently, so what? Who cares, really? It's the Internet! Or can you not tolerate an independently-held, dissenting opinion?
And as far as my 'focus' is concerned, your last post commented on the Times' "commitment to covering new and important trends and issues in the arts." I responded accordingly.

Updated On: 5/1/08 at 09:39 PM

[Sumofallthings]

Posted: 6/11/05 at 12:10am

You two knock it off. This is honestly the most intelligent thread I've read in a while and bickering will not bind it together with anything but pointless comments. Instead lets try to view the influence of the older shows on newer works. Was Adam Guettel influenced by his grandfathers legacy?

[BobbyRobbyBobbyBaby]

Posted: 6/11/05 at 1:25am

What an interesting thread! It's one of the best in a long while.

Margo, does this look like the article you're talking about? If so, I'll purchase and share.

MAGAZINE DESK | July 6, 2003, Sunday

A Complicated Gift

By JESSE GREEN (NYT) 4965 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 , Page 18 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - Jesse Green article profiles Adam Guettel, grandson of composer Richard Rodgers, who, like his grandfather, is musical prodigy haunted by personal demons; Guettel is working on music and lyrics for new musical The Light in the Piazza; Guettel's addiction to alcohol and drugs and how it affected his work and life discussed; photos (L)

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 6/11/05 at 1:27am

That's the one.

[BobbyRobbyBobbyBaby]

Posted: 6/11/05 at 1:50am

MAGAZINE DESK


A Complicated Gift
By JESSE GREEN (NYT) 4965 words
Published: July 6, 2003

Looking like a beat poet or a heavy-lidded hustler, in jeans, disintegrating T-shirt and black leather jacket, Adam Guettel surfaces in the rare Seattle sun after a morning at the keyboard, his fingers actually bleeding. 'Lovely, don't you think?' he asks, holding them up for inspection. He has been struggling to write a complicated new song this week -- also, depending on how you look at it, for three months or four years; four years is how long he's been working on 'The Light in the Piazza,' a musical based on Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella. There's a dramatic hole at the heart of the story, and it needs to be filled soon because the show is about to open in previews. But difficult as the assignment may be, passionate as Guettel's writing process is, that's not what has done the damage to his hands. He's done the damage. With his teeth.
Later, indoors, he will demonstrate some of his other nervous habits, which may qualify, he cheerily admits, as obsessive-compulsive tics. 'I don't enjoy turning on or off a light switch without being slightly off the ground,' he says, hopping on one foot. Then he shows me how pencils and other objects on his desk must be aligned along inscrutable axes only he can perceive. 'And of course I have to put my knee into the corner of a room.' He does so, and laughs, as if at the antics of a not-quite-funny but tolerated drunk.


Envious souls, which is to say most everyone involved in the theater, might be glad to find this apparently superfortunate human reduced to weird marionette behaviors. And Guettel is a test of your tolerance: how talented, charming, wealthy and 'maddeningly good-looking' (as his mother puts it) is it fair for one person to be? Among all the young composers working so hard (and so much more prolifically) to make a moribund art form sing, why is it Guettel who is dubbed the musical theater's crown prince and savior? That he is the most accomplished composer among them -- the most interesting lyricist too -- only makes it worse. That 'Piazza' is such a brilliant property for musicalization is also galling. People are envious of Guettel not just because he gets the acclaim, but also because he deserves it.

The odd thing is that Guettel resents the acclaim (and the presumption of deserving it) almost as much as anyone else. The savior-of-the-musical mantle, however well it fits, also burns; he's constantly clawing at it, tearing it off. The ragged fingers and all the rest are part of that story. Spend a minute with him -- it takes only one -- and a picture of the terror behind the tics starts to emerge. A simple terror, at first: the superstitious habits began when, as a boy soprano singing Yniold in 'Pelléas et Mélisande' at the Met, or the middle spirit in New York City Opera's 'Magic Flute,' he was desperate to keep his voice from the looming precipice. 'The fear was of cracking,' he says. It still is.

Glad to Be Unhappy,' with music by the miserable Richard Rodgers and words by the tormented Lorenz Hart, is one of Guettel's favorite songs. It is also a birthright. Rodgers was his maternal grandfather. Unhappiness is his raw material. And if the anguish and ameliorations of art are an old story, there's a reason we're still interested in why creative types suffer. Or how they suffer, anyway. Some try to eat their piano-playing fingers, some cut off their ears, some stash liquor in the toilet tank to ensure access to oblivion. That last was Rodgers: arguably the greatest American composer, and inarguably an alcoholic, a womanizer, an all-around tyrant. The wayward Hart did everything possible to get away from him when he couldn't face the music. Even Rodgers's piano seemed desperate to escape: according to his daughter Mary Rodgers Guettel, who is Adam's mother, it flew from under his importunate fingers as he sat there composing during a California earthquake.

Seventy years later, Guettel perfects his own means of escape -- emotional, technological, aesthetic. He calls himself a 'method' composer, meaning that he burrows deeply into his characters' lives and, among other delaying tactics, stores reams of earnest notes on his Palm Tungsten W. 'Loving him is having him be not what you would have him be but a harbinger of your truer next self,' reads one. 'Looking forward to love is just a fat line of cocaine.' Like those sentences, the two works on which his reputation so far hangs seem almost willfully obscure. It would be hard to imagine either of them ever playing on Broadway, or Guettel wanting them to. 'Floyd Collins,' a critical success at Playwrights Horizons in 1996, is based on the true story of a man trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925. 'Myths and Hymns' -- more a cycle of art songs than a musical -- was inspired by Greek mythology and an 1886 Presbyterian hymnal. Neither piece reflects in any obvious way the life he knows. He was raised in the almost chokingly sophisticated precincts of the Upper West Side, a cultural Brahmin and a (nonpracticing) Jew. When asked how his last name is pronounced, he says it rhymes with 'shtetl.'

Despite their unlikeliness, both works are extraordinary, authentic creations. Every youngish theater composer (Guettel is 3 must nod to Sondheim, and many genuflect so deeply that their spines turn into S's. But Guettel acknowledges the master in a privileged, unslavish way, as befits a lifelong family friend. The rhythmic inventiveness and restless harmonies are duly saluted, but in the supple long lines of the gorgeous melodies, it's Rodgers you hear on top. And more surprisingly, Oscar Hammerstein you hear in the words. Not that they are ever square or pedagogic. Guettel's lyrics, which he grudgingly (and sometimes incompletely) transforms into English from a litany of place-filling ahs and las and dicka-dicka-dums, are like Hammerstein's only in that they are openhearted and direct, relentlessly subjugating cleverness to craft. Rhyme is kept simple and wordplay subtle ('Went lookin' fer his fortune under the ground/Sure enough his fortune is what he found') so that 'Floyd Collins' sounds like Kentucky, not Turtle Bay.

All this careful constraint results in songs that course with raw, even threatening, feeling. They are often two to three times longer than standards: Guettel doesn't circle beauty balefully but pounces on it and feasts, wringing the last life from it. He seems to know there will be more, and this confidence -- a kind of lordliness even -- turns out to be crucial in addressing the listener's pleasure. This he does at least as consistently as any of his 'New Music Theater' contemporaries, while maintaining a level of adventurousness that would impress most of his elders.

'I don't hesitate to put him up there with the best,' says Arthur Laurents, who is Guettel's godfather but would not let that stop him if the opportunity for criticism arose. 'He's emotionally free in his lyrics and in his music, certainly more so than Steve.' Sondheim himself listed 'The Riddle Song' from 'Floyd Collins' -- almost nine minutes of unimpeded joy -- among those he most wishes he'd written himself.

But if 'Floyd Collins' was, as John Simon put it, 'the original and daring musical of our day,' it wasn't because of the joy. As with all the projects Guettel chooses, and agonizes over until you'd think they'd bleed like his fingers, it offered a kind of proving ground on which to detonate his most devastating fears. In this case, the fear was that his work, however good, would come to nothing: that he was himself trapped underground, his song echoing around an otherwise empty chamber. The subtext was his connection to Rodgers -- something he doesn't talk about much in public. (He even asked the Intiman Theater, where the premier production of 'Piazza' is playing through July 19, not to mention Rodgers in its press releases.) Nevertheless he tells me that in letting the trapped caver find peace at the end of 'Floyd Collins,' he was unconsciously shifting the weight of his legacy to bear it better. 'To fail in the pursuit of something noble,' he says, on a good day, 'is itself noble.'

As it turns out, though, legacies are not so easily shifted. Which may be why, as you track Guettel's work since the success of 'Floyd Collins,' the terrain remains rocky. 'Myths and Hymns,' a kind of musical 12-step program, questions the possibility of redemption for sins against God, against other people and against one's own soul. (In one semiautobiographical song, a man abandons his pregnant girlfriend as she is about to have an abortion.) Produced theatrically as 'Saturn Returns,' it sealed the composer's reputation -- while making that reputation harder to read. 'What's next for Mr. Guettel?' asked Stephen Holden in his 1998 Times review. 'Another folk musical? An opera? Either or both are possible. The talent is there, and it's major.'

For a while it looked as if those questions might never be answered, as Guettel struggled with various demons and various writers (including Laurents, Alfred Uhry and finally Craig Lucas) to put 'Piazza' together. The longer it took, the more it was anticipated, until at some point the show began to seem like a myth itself. But 'Piazza,' even in its imperfect first incarnation, turns out to be a real, ravishing work, a romantic chamber musical whose subject (love) and setting (Italy) provide Guettel with an entirely new palette of colors to blend, albeit in his characteristic bravura style. What is instantly recognizable everywhere is the darkness encroaching on the bright surface; 'Piazza' is as mottled with chiaroscuro as the artworks so admired by its protagonist, a resourceful American matron on vacation with her strangely childlike 26-year-old daughter. Though to Lucas (who is also directing the Seattle production) the main story is the mother's unexpected triumph in securing her daughter's happiness, to Guettel it's something so sad I can hardly square it with the debonair man who's telling me his version. Which is: a child of enormous privilege, damaged in some profound but secret way, wonders if that damage is so great that it will forever preclude the possibility of love.

'I was fascinated with drinking and drugs from as young as I remember,' Guettel says. 'Including pretending to get a hangover, smoking leaves off trees, sniffing mimeographed tests. When I first got high, when I was 13, my memory is that I shared a joint with a raccoon; that's how intense it was. It was the happiest moment of my life.' He smiles brilliantly, then lets the smile wilt. 'Still is.'

Guettel and I are walking up Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, toward a prospect he assures me is worth it. I am gasping, but only in part from the climb. His history with drugs is disturbing -- marijuana at 13 is one thing; cocaine at 14 is another -- and can't be dismissed as a rich kid's insufferable debauchery, even though some of the stories are painfully literal iterations of the theme of abusing his good fortune. Once, flying back to Exeter from New York, where he'd gone to sign papers regarding his grandfather's will, he scalped his Eastern Shuttle coupons for drug money and was beaten bloody in the process. That scared him clean for two years, but gradually, at Yale, where he felt isolated and unhappy, he slipped back into pot and mushrooms and pills.

And alcohol. 'After I graduated and was living in Brooklyn, I started drinking regularly at night, and smoking pot, and then cocaine happened again in my mid-20's. By the time I was 27 I was in recovery, but not authentically. The New York production of 'Floyd' happened when I was sober, but then I was in a car accident, herniated two discs and was given a Percocet. Soon I was taking 25 to 30 a day. I was an abject, drug-addled wretch, shades drawn, not eating, watching TV all day. Within six weeks I was in rehab again. Then came almost four years of sobriety, during which I finished 'Myths and Hymns,' put it on at the Public Theater, did some documentary scores and also wrote the first three or four songs for 'Piazza.' And then someone offered me Vicodin.

'In the last three years I've been in rehab twice, but basically it's been a pretty rough ride. Right now I have 69 days clean, and I have to keep going to meetings regularly or I know I will be doing drugs again. I'm playing Russian roulette. I don't know what would happen if someone offered me some kind of alcohol, if there were drugs at a party. And because of the matrix of drugs and sex. . . . ' He trails off, sighing.

There are many ways a legacy can turn out to be a burden, and Richard Rodgers's legacy to his heirs has succeeded at all of them. The gap between his secret reality and the beautiful world of his very public art almost swallowed up everyone standing nearby. Possibly as a reaction, his daughter Mary Rodgers Guettel has developed a personal style you might call knee-jerk transparency, except that you do not need even a tiny rubber mallet to get the goods from her. When I arrive at her Upper West Side apartment, she has already prepared a dossier of Adamic memorabilia: prep-school report cards, early compositions, joke photographs of the kind you'd usually burn, letters of filial love and apology. Her husband, Henry Guettel, helpfully provides a large manila envelope in which to transport the trove.

There is no trove large enough, though, to document the sheer too-muchness of this family. Too much talent, too much pain. It is, finally, a theatrical family, and not just because the living room features Jo Mielziner's watercolors of his sets for 'Pal Joey' and 'Pipe Dream.' The Guettels' very lives seem to be part of a master ironist's dramatic design. Or a master melodist's: Rodgers, dead almost a quarter century, still rakes in millions of dollars a year for his heirs and magnetizes them so completely with his monumental achievement that even if they turn away -- and despite their own achievements -- their very cells continue to align with him.

Nothing Adam Guettel does can therefore be seen in isolation from his family. Even 'Piazza.' It was his mother who suggested that he musicalize the story -- but not before having suggested the same thing, back in the 60's, to her father. 'Daddy told me it was lovely, but not for him,' she says now; Rodgers soon went on to write, with Sondheim and Laurents, his own American-in-Italy love story, the underrated 'Do I Hear a Waltz?' But why didn't Mary Rodgers (as she was professionally known) compose 'Piazza' herself? She had, after all, written the fine music for 'Once Upon a Mattress,' among other shows. 'I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent,' she says without self-pity. 'I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.' So somewhere along the way she let her theatrical career slip away in favor of young-adult fiction (the 'Freaky Friday' series) and the chairmanship of the Juilliard School. Not to mention motherhood. From her first marriage there were three children; from her second, to Guettel, himself a lifelong man of the theater, another three, all boys: Adam in the middle between Matthew and Alexander.

Painful things are dispensed so freely here, in such smart, neat proportions, that they might as well be martinis. Mary says that Adam seemed to come into his own for the first time when his brother Matthew, who had been sickly for nearly all of his four years, died of asthma. Until then, Adam had been quiet, picky, morose; desperate to get him to eat, they'd been reduced to letting him graze at little bowls of cut-up food they set on the kitchen floor. But after seeing his brother taken away, something changed. 'He came downstairs in his Doctor Dentons that evening,' Mary recalls, 'and started clowning around, poking people in the face, which was such a sudden personality change. As if he knew the meaning of what had happened, and now people would notice him or give him a chance. It was also right after that, after Matthew died, that Adam one day started singing 'The 59th Street Bridge Song' -- note perfect. He was not yet 2.'

Guettel publishes his work under the corporate name Matthew Music; if death was the beginning of his voice, vice was not far behind. Which is more precocious: that at age 11 he could sing before 3,800 people at the Met, his style lovely, his French impeccable? Or that he had started smoking Chesterfields at age 7? The push-pull of maturity is a recurring motif. When he was 13, just as he was about to star in the Met radio broadcast of 'Pelléas' and a television movie of 'Amahl and the Night Visitors,' his voice, despite the years of superstitious habits, finally broke. Or did it? 'I kind of faked that my voice was changing,' he says now. 'I probably could have sung those roles, but I didn't want to handle the pressure, which has some resonance as the beginning of my adult life.'

The botched opportunity was also a boon, diverting his musical impulses toward composing. He wrote his first pieces around age 14. While working on one of them, he was asked by Rodgers to play it louder; though the old man said he liked it, Guettel discounts the compliment: 'He was literally on his deathbed on the other side of the living-room wall.' Still, the baton was passed, and the boy took off fast. 'For the first year he wrote, I could advise him,' his mother recalls. 'Tell him things like, 'The ear likes to know where the harmonic home is, so try to get back there.' After that, he was so far beyond anything I could ever have dreamed of, I just backed off.'

By the time he returned to New York after college, in 1987, having gritted his teeth through theory and composition, Guettel was a very promising young composer, with a 20-minute concerto for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra already to his credit. But by then he was also an addict.

Though his drug use has only been whispered about in theater circles, Guettel's reputation as a Lothario has been bruited almost proudly. Even his father told me, not exactly censoriously, about the dozens of 'lovely, spurned ladies spread all over the pavements of Manhattan' -- one of whom supposedly wrote a musical about him, featuring a number of embittered ex-girlfriends. His mother sharpened the point: 'I mean, let's face it, he has the sexual proclivities of a satyr. Or of his grandfather.'

It seems that even in his worst traits Guettel will always be compared with Richard Rodgers, who bedded any chorus girl he could get his hands on. 'I know I've hurt a lot of women, and I feel terrible about it,' Guettel says. 'It's easy to get away with things when you have money and people think you're attractive. Also when you're verbal and have ready access to silken prose, which only sometimes reflects what you're really thinking. I hope that phase is over. Because there's a point at which, being unhappy for too long, you become irrevocably unkind, like my grandfather. I'd like to be happy, if only to be able to be kind.'

He seems happy enough as he says this; still, having seen him perform his songs in concert, I know how he works an audience. Charm goes a long way but, like money, is often misspent. Guettel admits as much. 'Competence,' he says, 'is the only real antidote for how I feel most of the time.'

But it's a sunny day in Seattle, and the Queen Anne prospect, once we reach it, is spectacular. 'Maybe I'm just on the local instead of the express,' he says, referring not just to love but also to the hope of straightening himself out for good. 'It takes a long time to admit that you have this problem, that it's a terminal illness. I've risked my life so many times now, in cars where I can barely see, doing cocaine and drinking and driving, with a stick shift on the Taconic. And it's never over. Because it's not just a disease; it's me, it's knowing how much I could do if I kept it together, if I had the courage and stamina and willpower! I wish I could just have fun and relax and not have the responsibility of that potential to be some kind of great man! In my family, to be good is to fail. To be very good is to fail. To only do three really good things is to fail. The only thing not a failure is to be great. And that' -- he shuts his eyes -- 'is tiring.'

So this is what comes of 'Edelweiss' and 'You'll Never Walk Alone.' All that joy and solace -- admittedly some of it the gift of Hammerstein's words -- passed on like a giant rock to be carried up ev'ry damn mountain. If his grandfather's trust has allowed Guettel to make his art carefully, to work on each project for years without having to write jingles or wait on tables to pay the rent in between, it has also financed the death-defying addictions that every day threaten to crack his voice forever.

I ask him to tot up the losses.

'Oh, I've lost jobs,' he sighs. 'I've lost a good 20 percent of my singing ability by frying my voice with alcohol and cigarettes and pot. But the big thing I've lost is time -- I think, conservatively, 10 years of writing, because it's 16 years since I got out of school, and I was gainfully employed for only six of them. Which actually makes me fairly quick as a writer, contrary to my image.'

True enough. We descend the hill, trying not to tumble, and Guettel gets back to work on the missing song. So far, it exists only as a jumble of musical motifs and fragmentary lyrics on his computer, filed under the apt (if temporary) title 'Falling.'

The song wasn't ready for the first-night preview I saw on May 31 -- it went into the show 10 days later -- but I assume I will hear it when 'Piazza' comes to New York after a production, this winter, at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. If it comes to New York. The economics of serious chamber musicals, on Broadway or off, are not easy to square. When I first asked Guettel about the possibility of 'bringing in' what he calls his 'tender little experiment,' he said: 'I don't care. I've got a trust fund' -- which was, in part, defensive. He does care. But he also recognizes that New York may not be a viable option for every project, not at the risk of someone else's $5 million. Even in Seattle, the Intiman has bet the farm ('and some of the livestock,' says Laura Penn, the theater's managing director) on a production that, at $1.1 million, is three times as expensive as its typical show.

What Guettel really wants is for the work to be good, and then for it to have a future. He doesn't deny that a New York production would help further both goals; New York is where he and his collaborator, Tina Landau, polished 'Floyd Collins' to a high gloss and where it received the kind of acclaim that translates into heavy listening and licensing. (The Rodgers & Hammerstein Theater Library, which unsurprisingly handles the production rights to Guettel's works, has licensed 40 North American productions of 'Floyd Collins' in four years, making it, according to Theodore Chapin, president of the R&H Organization, the 'Oklahoma!' of the New Music Theater set.) But what a show seeking a future really needs is to be recorded and to have its score published -- both of which seem certain to happen for 'Piazza.' What's unclear is whether anyone other than the superior singer-actors that Lucas and Guettel have assembled will ever be able to perform it.

Anyone can whistle a happy tune. But take a look at the score of 'Piazza.' To create its highly chromatic, yearning atmosphere (Guettel calls it faux-Lisztian), the harpist is kept so busy changing pedals that she's basically doing a clog dance. The other instruments -- piano, violin, cello, bass -- aren't spared, either. The vocal lines are compulsively notated down to the last crotchet, specifying the kinds of inflections and back-phrasings that other composers would leave to the singers' sense of style. It's not pedantry; it's how Guettel hears, and in some sense tries to stabilize, his damaged world. Is 'Love to Me' -- the romantic climax of the score -- less heart-melting because it is set mostly in the compound time signature of 5/8+4/8? No, it is more so, thanks to that strangely limping extra eighth-note, which seems to argue that imperfection can be another kind of beauty. But just try learning it without Guettel's longtime music director, Ted Sperling, hammering out the beats.

What few can learn, few can love. 'I can't help that,' Guettel says. 'We can finally admit, confidentially, that being a prominent theater composer is like being a prominent manuscript illuminator. So let's not ask people to think more of this art form than they want to.' Which seems a shame because, with enough tinkering, 'Piazza' could be a classic. The main strengths of the novella are retained, and in many places enhanced by Lucas's comedic gifts. Beyond that, the story has pulled from Guettel half a dozen of the most convincing and beautiful new theater songs I've heard in a long time. They are surprising and at the same time not so; 'Love to Me' may be in an abstruse meter but, beneath its skin, as if genetically programmed, it has conventional A-A-B-A bones. If a good melody is, in Guettel's phrase, a dense packet of information that unfolds over time -- something you can put in your pocket, carry lightly and open as needed -- 'Piazza' is a pocketful.

'There is a nexus of three things that makes a song reach into the world,' Guettel says. 'The writer's craft is one; his soul is another. And the third is the thing that no one has control over: the times. Grandpa was in the right place at the right time. He thought about the right things, even if he wasn't the most enlightened person personally. And he had perfect control of his technique. A simple song like' -- he can't remember its name, but he means 'Do-Re-Mi' from 'The Sound of Music' -- 'will never be forgotten. And I have to believe it is possible to write songs today that will be as universally comprehensible in our time as those songs were in theirs.'

Another inherited burden. And yet, on my last day in Seattle, Guettel relates a dream he once had about his grandfather: 'I was walking him to an elevator. I asked him if I was any good. He said, rather kindly, 'You have your own voice,' and the elevator doors closed.'

I take Guettel's telling me this to mean that, despite profound ambivalence about the family business, he is resolved to carry it forward -- in his own way. His next project, a shockingly ambitious concert piece for Audra McDonald, will make all his previous risks seem like, well, 'Do-Re-Mi.'

Though the day 'Piazza' plays its first preview is only his 70th day of recovery, Guettel is making plans as if he will get to 700 and beyond. It does seem to be a good sign that he has stopped hiding -- not just the painful truths of his life, but the more painful hopes. I also take it as an omen that 'Piazza' has a happy ending, albeit (as Guettel insists) an 'off-axis' one: the child, never learning how she was damaged, gets to marry her Italian suitor. Musically, the ending is less ambivalent; the mother's farewell song, after a turbulent 125 measures, resolves with a delicate and transparent figure in peaceful C-sharp major. Those last bars sound, I can't help thinking, like the golden sky at the end of the storm, suggesting the hope, however Hammersteinian, that if the ear can find its way home, so can we all. At the same time, though, the curtain is falling -- it's a brilliant stage picture -- between parent and child, as if to add that finding the way home can sometimes mean leaving it for good.




Photos: Adam Guettel (Justin Stephens); Composer/Grand-Composer: Guettel with the cast of 'Piazza'; Rodgers with Danny Kaye in 1970. (Justin Stephens for The New York Times, Lee Romero/The New York Times); Not as Simple as 'Do-Re-Mi': The Evolution of a Song: Version 1 (February) 'Unoriginal,' Guettel says of the lyrics for this bar of 'Fable.' 'And too precious.'; Version 2 (February-June) 'Rejected for being too harsh, not enough of an invitation into the idea.'; The Keeper (June) 'Craig's suggestion: Excellent because it is character-specific . . . and sings well.'

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 6/11/05 at 2:01am

Thanks for that.