Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

If ever there were an issue of American Theatre that should come with a bonus CD attached, this is it. 

Sure, acclaimed young composer-lyricist Adam Guettel and American Theatre’s probing interviewer David Savran talk with great sophistication (in our lead feature, page 26) about what makes Guettel’s score for the new musical The Light in the Piazza so special—its dramatic use of tension and release, its richly expressive chromaticism, its debt to classical and contemporary influences. But conversation, no matter how savvy, will never be able to convey the lush, luminous emotionalism of Guettel’s music for this romantic but peculiarly freighted tale of Americans abroad in the convention-bound 1950s. Fans of the composer’s bluegrass-haunted set pieces for Floyd Collins or the high-flying harmonies of Saturn Returns will recognize that the arrival of Piazza, at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre last summer and beginning Jan. 10 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, marks Guettel as the most versatile and unpredictable—and perhaps the most ambitious—of the post-Sondheim generation of theatre composers. 

There’s stuff that’s equally ripe for amplification on CD in our annual Approaches to Theatre Training section (devoted, on the heels of last year’s “Designer as Thinker” compendium, entirely to the craft of acting): Who wouldn’t love to hear verbatim the fervent, straight-from-the-hip exhortations of acting coaches David Mamet and William H. Macy in the formative days of the Atlantic Theater Company (as reported by Jordan Lage, page 38); or recorded echoes of the real voices of those opposing titans of Russian theatre, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, whose seminal theories are once again a hot topic these days in Moscow (page 34)? 

Alas, we can’t afford the bonus CD. Whatever sounds you hear as you explore the richly detailed articles in this issue will be generated—like the harmonies of first love in Florence, or the resolution of dissonant chords in classic acting theory—by the vibrations of theatrical imagination. —Jim O’Quinn
 

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