Born With a Golden Ear
Richard Rodgers's Grandson Makes His Mark in Musicals

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Adam Guettel craves control. Journalists arriving for interviews without tape recorders have even known the composer-lyricist to proffer his own digital device.

"I turn it on and say, 'I'm going to e-mail this to you, and this is what you're going to make your interview based on,' " Guettel explains crisply.

Perhaps that bent for precision helps explain why his musicals are so exacting and polished, if few and far between.

"I like to be able to really work on something alone for a while until I know it's really ready," says Guettel, 41, a dashing, serious-looking figure in frayed jeans, T-shirt and classic peacoat. Guettel's "Floyd Collins" was a critical if not commercial success off-Broadway in 1996; his next full-blown stage show, "The Light in the Piazza" -- which begins a three-week run tonight at the Kennedy Center -- won six Tony Awards on Broadway last year.

Of course, genes could be another explanation for his exceptional skills. He's the grandson of Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein), son of Mary Rodgers ("Once Upon a Mattress"). Yet it took him a while to decide to go into the family business. When he was a kid it was a question of cool, and later it was something like self-defense.

"Our society is not too keen on the legacies," suggests Guettel (rhymes with "mettle"). "They're not like: 'Great -- some famous guy's grandson. Let's really get behind that.' "

That attitude goes double for Broadway producers, who can't afford sentimental gambles at today's multimillion-dollar costs. "Have enough money to live on? Sure," Guettel says of his birthright. "Instant success? Sorry."

Although his is a still-evolving career, the music he has produced is ravishing enough that "Piazza" director Bartlett Sher offhandedly calls him "the best composer in the American theater." And when "Piazza" was still in Chicago, critic John Lahr guessed it was too good for New York, writing: "Guettel's kind of talent cannot be denied. He shouldn't change for Broadway; Broadway, if it is to survive as a creative theatrical force, should change for him."

The sumptuousness of the occasionally operatic "Piazza" -- about a Southern mother abroad in Italy trying to protect her daughter from a potentially painful love affair -- is a world away from the stark, swooping Appalachian folk idiom of "Floyd Collins" (based on a trapped caver's true story that was a brief media sensation in 1925). And the mid-1990s song cycle "Myths and Hymns" (a.k.a. "Saturn Returns") recalls everything from 19th-century church music to a Tin Pan Alley soft-shoe and even funk-fueled jazz-pop (think freewheeling Steely Dan). The music and lyrics claw at the gates of heaven in "Come to Jesus," as troubling and heartbreaking as it is complex. The melody twists and soars in "Icarus," with Guettel himself singing in an ever higher voice that sounds as though it's answering a dare.

"I'd rather put myself in harm's way than take some safe route, I think," says Guettel, sitting in an empty office downstairs at Lincoln Center, where "Piazza" enjoyed its run last season (and where his next project, "The Princess Bride," will get its next private airing in a few months). His answers are often deftly technical -- so much so that when Sher says that Guettel "has the most astute overall theater mind of anyone I've met," you get why he says it.

Sher's preface -- "I don't know where it comes from" -- feels as if he's dodging the obvious. Clearly, Guettel was born to it. The composer recalls his mother taking him to a revival of "Oklahoma!" when he was 2 years old, and he quickly asked when it would be over. "She said, 'You hate it that much?' And I said, 'No, I want to know how much longer I have, it's so good.' "

He took up piano a couple of years later, and before he was a teenager, he was singing solos in the Metropolitan Opera choir -- "a wonderful childhood," he says of that time. He credits his mother with the bedrock of his musical education: "The primary colors of writing music were given to me in part by her just sitting around," he says. "She did not pull her punches. I'd play her things when I was 13 or 14, and she'd say, 'You call that a melody?' I'd say, 'Yeah, I was thinking that was a melody.' "

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."