Life as Music

The tide turned. I was at the concert performance at London’s Barbican, to start a dazzling all-Adams weekend, in January 2002; it was a hot-ticket item that drew an ecstatic, mostly young crowd. At that time elsewhere in London, Adams himself was preparing a film version of the score; that has now been shown in Britain and the U.S., and is due for DVD release before the year’s end; this month’s Prague production is one further step along its road to redemption. “The subject matter is painful,” Adams freely admits. “But the best thing is that people have gone back to it.”

I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: A true laureate can even set a California earthquake to music, and this frisky bit of stage biz shook up a few viewers at its 1995 Berkeley premiere. “A few people felt that this was a comedown,” Adams remembers. “They just don’t know about my lighter side. They forget that my very first performance was next to my mother in a production of South Pacific in Concord, New Hampshire. That was me on that stage, with two other stage brats, singing ‘Dites-moi, pourquoi, la vie est belle.’

“When I first came to San Francisco,” he continues, “I did some teaching at the Conservatory, but I prefer a less formal framework. Our house in Berkeley is always full of kids — my own and other people’s. We work on projects, mostly in musical theater on the level of Ceiling/Sky, and it becomes a real workshop. The first boy you’ll hear on tape in Transmigration, singing ‘missing . . . missing,’ is one of my kids. My musical life began working with kids, and a lot of it continues that way.”