Troubadour

Shostakovich reminds us that there’s still good music to be written in C major.  John Bucchino reminds us there are still true stories to tell just with voice and piano.

The artist made a rare solo appearance at Birdland Monday night, embodying his humane, quicksilver ballads with fleet fingers and a rumpled-bed baritone.  He’s not principally a theatre songwriter; but he’s emblematic of the interestingly fraught place theatre songwriting finds itself in these days.

His range is wide.   He can write the tense, tidy, after-Sondheim ballad of literate urban ambivalence—he pushes it to the brink of mad scene in a number like “Not a Cloud in the Sky Today,” and into scena itself in the climactic monologue “I Stayed,” from his recent musical A Catered Affair.  He writes high-gloss, Manhattan-Transfer jazz (“That Smile”) and surging, ardent post-racial spirituals (“Grateful,” “Better Than I;”) eccentric and sometimes screamingly funny comedy (“Contact High”) and folkish story-songs simple as a lullaby (“Sweet Dreams.”)

You’d think the natural place for an artist of these skills would be in the theatre, and, indeed, Bucchino’s score for A Catered Affair produced one of the more limpidly beautiful duets to be heard on a New York stage in years in “Don’t Ever Stop Saying I Love You.”  But, as he confided Monday night, “I like best those songs that you don’t entirely understand:” and Bucchino really becomes Bucchino when he writes surreal, only-casually-logical numbers like his oddly cheery post-apocalyptic musings on ”Those Ambrosia Days,” or the new “Learn How to Say Goodbye,” which starts out as a confession of writer’s block and concludes with some ship-into-port imagery as satisfying as it is non-linear.   His music, too, gets richer as the focus gets smaller: a thousand chromatic changes limn the adulterous heroine of “Sepia Life,” and the two (there are only two) tonic cadences in the repeated mantras of “In a Restaurant By the Sea” are as magical as anything in Schubert.

The theatre needs its songwriters to be storytellers.  But some of the most interesting artists working—John Bucchino, Adam Guettel—have the souls of confessional poets.  Can artist and medium adjust to each other?  Will audiences follow along?  Let’s hope we—and John—get to find out.