Born With a Golden Ear

He laughs, a rare moment of sheepishness creeping into a persona that's somewhere between coolly professional and cocksure. Suggest that it's lucky he's ruthless enough to drop projects early if they're not working and he says flatly: "It's not luck. I know what I'm looking for."

And he jumps for joy -- yes, literally -- when he finds it. When author William Goldman agreed to consider making a musical of his beloved book "The Princess Bride," Guettel hit his head on the ceiling of the South Carolina motel where he was staying.

"With those weird plaster balls that they spray on," he explains, "all these balls were in my hair when I came down. I was just so happy that I had something new to do."

"The Princess Bride" might seem like a safe project, since Broadway is already jammed with stories that audiences know from the movies. But Guettel knows the risks of messing up something the public loves -- and with "The Princess Bride," there's no way to fail small.

By contrast, "Piazza" -- based on the Elizabeth Spencer novella (turned into a minor 1962 movie starring Olivia de Havilland and George Hamilton) -- crept gradually not only into its popularity, but also into its sweeping scale. It was originally composed for a piano trio, fully becoming the lush, string- and harp-fueled piece that Kennedy Center audiences will see only when it moved onto the spacious Vivian Beaumont stage.

(Did the added instrumentation improve the piece? "Yes," he says immediately, suggesting that the plush romantic sound was "very good for supporting the audience's imagination.")

"The Princess Bride," on the other hand, is being engineered big from the start. Guettel intends to ask for an orchestra of 24 -- huge these days -- figuring that with two Tonys in his back pocket and the immortal Goldman at his side penning the book, this is his chance to go for broke. And he figures the story needs it: Who wants to see a puny "Princess Bride"?

"It goes like a shot," Guettel reports, adding that the trick will be to give the audience what they want -- only not exactly.

"I'd rather err on the side of esoterica, or 'unexpected-a,' " he says, coining a word, "than delivering right down the line like some sort of punch list. This is a fairy-tale adventure, and the most important part of that is adventure. So the music reflects that. . . . I think the music already" -- he corrects himself. "I know the music already embodies that."

There is an undisciplined side to Guettel that has been destructive -- peculiar phobias and past addictions thoroughly chronicled in a New York Times Magazine piece as "Piazza" was nudging into view. "What can I tell you; I'm a person," he says with a shrug at the end of a sophisticated answer about being imperfect, unguarded and not sophisticated in interviews.

He was smoking so heavily during "Piazza" that his singing was deeply impaired. The experience was devastating for someone who not only is so transparently in love with the human voice and so professionally interested in exploring its limits, but also who sometimes performs -- and who typically teaches his scores vocally.

"It was one of the most depressing things I've ever been through," he says, the habit kicked for more than two years now. Guettel asks a lot of singers, and even has a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, but the dazzlingly rangy whoops and echoes in "Floyd" taught him not to make his demands unrealistic.

His demand of himself is not to make trendy, disposable art. Although he admires the "Sesame Street" takeoff "Avenue Q," for instance, it would never occur to him to riff on modern TV. Instead, he cites the oeuvre of O. Henry: "It's beautifully undated," he contends. "And I'm very, very concerned with making sure that my work has that kind of longevity."

If Broadway seems more interested in long-running jukebox hits culled from pop catalogues, Guettel is unfazed.

"It's up to us writers to be smart enough to come up with stuff that's going to sell," he declares. "I don't have the energy to worry about this trend, or what producers are looking for, or what's selling and what's not. There are a lot of people buying tickets to the musical theater. And that's all I need to know."