The Next Generation

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Where did the sassy, savvy show tunes of yesteryear go? Has the all-American genre been smothered in middlebrow blandness by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his carpetbag clones? Way Back to Paradise (Nonesuch/Atlantic), the first solo album from three-time Tony winner Audra McDonald, points to smarter times ahead for the Great White Way. It contains 14 songs by five young composers who specialize in musical theater, none of which sound even remotely like Memory. All are highly listenable; a few, downright remarkable.

Anyone who has seen Ragtime knows there is no finer singer on Broadway than McDonald. A 28-year-old Juilliard School graduate who opted for musical comedy over grand opera, she has a tangy, beautifully focused soprano voice and an intensely evocative way with words. She could make a toothpaste jingle sound poignant--and the songs on Way Back to Paradise are anything but mindless tunes. Jason Robert Brown's Stars and the Moon tells the wry tale of a material girl who brushes off a series of poor but ardent suitors only to learn that yachts and champagne aren't everything; Ricky Ian Gordon's Dream Variations is a laconic, sweet-and-sour setting of the famous poem by Langston Hughes that ends with "Night coming tenderly/ Black like me."

Most impressive of all is Adam Guettel, Richard Rodgers' grandson, who is living proof of the power of good genes. Best known for his 1996 musical Floyd Collins, Guettel is a startlingly original songwriter who, judging by the four songs included on Way Back to Paradise, has a straight shot at becoming the next Stephen Sondheim. His expressive range is wide enough to encompass The Allure of Silence, a gentle vignette of unspoken love on a winter evening, and Come to Jesus, a harrowing, near operatic dialogue between a woman about to have an abortion and the devastated lover who has deserted her ("You feel it too, dying, and I can't look anymore").

Add to this the hushed lyricism of Jenny Giering's I Follow and the mordant merriment of Michael John LaChiusa's Mistress of the Senator, and you've got a collection guaranteed to make intelligent theater-music fans prick up their ears. There's only one catch: Way Back to Paradise contains scenes, arias, and even full-blown art songs. But nostalgia-hungry listeners will search in vain among these determinedly theatrical post-Sondheim musical monologues for anything resembling the straightforward, crisply turned lyrics and incisive 32-bar melodies that for decades defined American popular music at its best.

So, will the saloon singers of the next century still be crooning George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer? Or is a new generation of as-yet-unknown popular songwriters quietly turning out tomorrow's standards today? Perhaps Audra McDonald will answer that question on her next album.

--By Terry Teachout