Editor's Note

Editor's Note by Jim O'Quinn

Whither the American musical theatre? It's a question nobody seems able to venture a confident answer to. The talented composers featured in Mark Blankenship's lead feature "Breaking the Sound Barrier"—all of whom cut their theatrical teeth as professional sound designers—certainly aren't making any blanket pronouncements about the future of the genre. They're too busy working to pontificate. But, perhaps ironically, the way they're stretching and blending the twin disciplines at their disposal—"When we say sound," asserts composer-lyricist Kim Sherman, "we also mean music"—could have a signal effect on the development of musical theatre in this post-Sondheim era.

The distance between these contemporary artists and their forbears is vividly underscored elsewhere in the issue, in critic Howard Kissel's thumbnail sketch of the career of fabled director-choreographer Gower Champion. As a song-and-dance man in the golden years of the musical theatre, Champion brought "consummate craftsmanship and boundless imagination," Kissel says, to classic shows that were conceived as "pure entertainment."

Needless to say, technical skill and bold ideas will never go out of fashion, as the work of the adventurous composers in Blankenship's story attests. But today's musical theatre landscape, enriched by an eclectic array of influences from opera to electronics to avant-garde experimentation, bears little resemblance to Champion's Broadway-derived universe of ingenues and hoofers. "How do we keep from simply being part of the formula?" composer Mark Bennett asks rhetorically. The best way, given the uncertain rush of recent theatrical history, seems to be re-calibrating the formula from the ground up.

Sherman, Bennett and their fellow innovators will by no means have the last word on our prospects for a newly invigorated American musical theatre. American Theatre's planning calendar for future months includes "Don't Stop the Music," an exploration of the practical aspects of bringing new music-theatre works to the stage, researched and written by Terry Berliner; and an on-the-scene encounter with another fresh creative force in the field, singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, whose musicals Spring Awakening and Nero (Another Golden Rome) are slated to debut later this season.

In the meantime, consider composer Andre Pluess's admonition to listen to the sound of (not-so-incidental) theatrical music in a new way. He's not just writing notes, Pluess avows, but "creating a cohesive sonic aesthetic to tell a story."