“I would like to think that I had a significant insight into the girls in Little Women because I wasn’t bound by gender roles. On the other hand maybe the answer is – I had two sisters and we grew up in the same house!”
Out composer Mark Adamo’s triumphant hit opera Little Women – with twenty-four productions in less than five years – has astounded critics and endeared audiences to the voices of his vividly drawn characters.
“A lot of that dialogue was from my family. A straight guy might have done that too,” Adamo says.
But others have tried and failed at adapting Louise May Alcott’s classic novel — there have been three Hollywood film adaptations plus a musical, none of which captured the novel’s soulful magic while also replicating its Victorian era charm. Rather than ignoring how others approached the material, Adamo studied the past efforts before beginning his opera, for which he also functioned as librettist.
“I was trained as a playwright as well as a composer. I was in the writing program at NYU and then the composition program at Catholic University. I am able to write as knowingly from the theatrical point of view as well as from the musical point of view.”
A sure-handed dramatist, Adamo’s solution was to focus on the character of Jo March and her reluctance to grow old and leave the bonds of family. “Perfect as we are” becomes her motivation as well as her leitmotif — and receives a melodic treatment that echoes “No one is alone,” a memorable tune by another composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim.
Like most good composers, Adamo knows how to fill time up with interesting sounds – including in conversation. He’s quick, articulate and well read. But like other classical musicians, when the questions turn to matters of sexuality, the tempo slows. Adamo even missed a beat here and there.
“I was surprised at how relatively square and quasi-conservative the concert music world seemed in comparison to the theatre world which was much looser and funnier,” he said. “And if it was political it was distinctly left and being gay was sort of assumed.” Yet Adamo’s indoctrination into classical music was as a student at the Catholic University — restrained environment by any measure.
“I suppose an English song literature class at C.U. was the wrong context to make a flippant remark about another of Benjamin Bitten’s ‘Oh-this-beautiful-boy-will-be-the-death-of-me-operas.’ But I felt it was one of the most obvious observations in the world to make!”
Amidst the avalanche of praise for Little Women, one critic called it “the new Amahl.” A comparison to Amahl and the Night Visitor, the evergreen holiday classic by Gian Carlo Menotti, is apt for more reasons than one. Menotti built his fame with operas that, like Little Women, are easily produced by small companies and flattering to young singers. But Menotti was also the lover of the elder composer Samuel Barber. Since 1995, Adamo, 40, has been in a relationship with the Oscar and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano who is twenty-five years his senior.
“Our age difference is actually a plus, because it takes away any possibility of rivalry,” Adamo recently explained. There’s also the fact that Adamo continues to focus on music for the theatre – he’s now at work on an operatic setting of the Greek comedy Lysistrata – while Corigliano writes primarily for orchestra. This winter, the two spent their days toiling away at new scores in their respective studios attached to their country home in upstate New York. “John’s studio faces the lake and I face the woods.”
(A version of this story originally appeared in The Advocate.)
