Composers of the Month

Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown & Michael John LaChiusa

These three American contemporaries are acclaimed for creating some of the most involving musicals of recent years both in terms of subject matter, structure and musical style. Hailed as the heirs of Stephen Sondheim (in common, all three are both composers and lyricists), the trio have won numerous awards and their albums are an essential part of the collections of anyone interested in the future of the genre.

Adam Guettel

Adam Guettel, born 16 December 1964, is best known for 2005's The Light in the Piazza, for which he won two Tony Awards. Guettel, the son of Mary Rodgers and grandson of Richard Rodgers, was born and raised in the Upper West Side of New York City. He performed as a boy soprano but turned to music composition soon afterward. The composer attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Interlochen Center for the Arts and graduated from Yale University in 1987.

His early works include Love's Fire, and Saturn Returns (which was recorded as Myths and Hymns). Guettel's music was almost immediately characterized by its complexity and use of various strings. He is perhaps one of the modern musical theatre composers most heavily influenced by the work of Stephen Sondheim (for his part, Sondheim has referred to Guettel's work as "dazzling").

He wrote music and lyrics for the remarkable Floyd Collins, the surprisingly uplifting true story of a caver who generated one of the first media circuses after becoming trapped underground. The show received the 1996 Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical and earned Guettel the Obie Award for Best Music. Floyd has been presented at Playwrights Horizons, New York; Prince Theatre, Philadelphia; Goodman Theatre, Chicago; Old Globe, San Diego and the Bridewell, London.

After six years working on the project, Guettel's musical The Light in the Piazza opened on Broadway in 2005. This profound and moving show concerns the romantic fortunes of a mother and daughter travelling in Italy in the 1950s and starred Victoria Clark and Kelli O'Hara. Piazza won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Original Score as well as Best Orchestrations.

In summer 2007, Guettel composed background music for a production of Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya at the Intiman Playhouse in Seattle and in July 2009, the Signature Theatre of Arlington, Virginia commissioned Guettel to write a new musical for their 2011-2012 season.

Four Guettel songs were featured on Audra McDonald's album, Way Back To Paradise (1998), and two more appear on her 2000 album, How Glory Goes. Guettel himself performed a concert evening of his work at New York’s Town Hall in 1999. Film scores include Arguing The World, a feature documentary by Joe Dorman, and the score for Jack, a two-hour documentary for CBS by Peter Davis (1994). Accolades include the Stephen Sondheim Award (1990), the ASCAP New Horizons Award (1997), and the American Composers Orchestra Award (2005).

Jason Robert Brown

Jason Robert Brown was born June 20, 1970 in Ossining, New York and studied composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Brown is also an accomplished pianist and has often served as music director, conductor, orchestrator and pianist for his own productions.

Jason Robert Brown’s first musical, "Songs for a New World," a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, played Off-Broadway at the WPA Theatre in the fall of 1995, and has since been seen in more than two hundred productions around the world.

In 1999 , Brown won the Tony Award for his score to "Parade", a musical written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in December 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical. Parade is an extraordinary piece of theatre and follows the real life trial of Leo Frank for murder and deals with racism tin the southern states of the USA. A 2007 production by the Donmar Theatre in London is a landmark recording of a musical, complete with dialogue.

In 2001, Brown wrote the musical, "The Last Five Years," which was cited as one of Time Magazine's 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics. A two hander about a failed relationship, the show has a structural twist and follows the man from the start to the finish but the woman, from the end backwards to the start.

Jason's newest musical, "13," written with Dan Elish and directed by Todd Graff, premiered to rave reviews at Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum, and opened on Broadway in 2008. A hilarious tale of growing up in America, it follows a group of 13 year-olds and featured a highly talented young cast.

Brown has been hailed as "one of Broadway's smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim", and his "extraordinary, jubilant theater music" has been heard all over the world. He is the winner of the 2002 Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics and the 1996 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Jason's songs, including the cabaret standard "Stars and the Moon," have been performed and recorded by Audra McDonald, Betty Buckley, Renée Fleming, Philip Quast and many others. Jason's first solo album, "Wearing Someone Else's Clothes," featuring his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, was named one of Amazon.com's best of 2005.

Michael John LaChiusa

Michael John LaChiusa (born July 24, 1962) is an American musical theatre and opera composer, lyricist, and librettist. He is best known for complex, musically challenging shows such as Hello Again, Marie Christine, The Wild Party, and See What I Wanna See. He has been nominated for the Tony Award for his score and book for Marie Christine, and for his books for The Wild Party and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

LaChiusa grew up in Chautauqua, New York and taught himself to play piano at the age of seven. He was influenced early on by the music of "modern American composers" such as John Corigliano, John Adams, and Philip Glass, as well as the musical theatre composers George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Stephen Sondheim.1993, The Public Theater's producer George C. Wolfe presented LaChiusa's First Lady Suite, a quirky, brilliant, small scale musical about four famous presidential wives, which has subsequently been revived and recorded by the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles.

A year later, Lincoln Center produced his musical Hello Again. A clever and witty updating of interconnected stories about love based on Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde, Hello Again was nominated for ten Drama Desk Awards, including three (Outstanding Book of a Musical, Outstanding Music, and Outstanding Lyrics) for LaChiusa. It has subsequently been successful staged in London (Bridewell Theatre) as well as several other countries.

During the 1999-2000 season, two of LaChiusa's large-scale musicals premiered on Broadway: Marie Christine and The Wild Party. Marie Christine, a brilliant retelling of the Medea myth set in 19th-century Louisiana, starred Audra McDonald and attracted controversy due to its grim subject matter and demanding score. It remains, however, one of the greatest, through composed musicals of the last decade. The Wild Party was based on the 1928 poem of the same name by Joseph Moncure March and starred Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, and Eartha Kitt. The show centres on Queenie, a Vaudeville dancer, and Burrs, her pshopathic lover and black-face clown. It features a stunning jazz-age score and received seven Tony nominations.

In 2003, Little Fish, an uncharacteristically cheerful one-act musical for LaChiusa, based on two short stories by Deborah Eisenberg, premiered Off-Broadway. The show, primarily about a woman trying to quit smoking, was successful revived and recorded in Los Angeles.

In 2005, LaChiusa's show See What I Wanna See, based on the stories "In a Grove," "The Dragon," and "Kesa and Morito" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, had a successful Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater. The first half is an ingenious retelling of the Rashomon story in which a husband, a wife and a thief tell conflicting tales about the death of the husband. LaChiusa was nominated for Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics.

In April 2009, the Signature Theatre, Arlington, Virginia, premiered Giant, a musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's 1952 novel of the same name with music and lyrics by LaChiusa and book by Sybille Pearson. Other plans include a version of Carmen with Audra McDonald in mind.

So, three outstanding talents with a host of thrilling albums behind them for anyone seriously interested in the post-Sondheim direction of musical theatre. Or try a collection of their work on some of Audra McDonald solo albums.