By MICHAEL KUCHWARA, AP Drama Writer

NEW YORK - The exotic, otherworldly sounds that accompanied an acclaimed revival of "Twelfth Night." The country and gospel-flecked melodies of a little musical-that-could called "Violet." The brash, jazz-baby rhythms of 1920s New York in "Thoroughly Modern Millie."

Say this for composer Jeanine Tesori: You can't pigeonhole her or predict the type of music she will write next. Right now, it's "Millie," a dlrs 10 million adaptation of the Julie Andrews movie about a terribly up-to-date flapper, that has Tesori's full attention.

The splashy show is big-time Broadway, which means Tesori is facing all the pressure that opening an expensive new musical entails. Yet she looks remarkably stress-free as she picks over a cheeseburger at a West 44th Street restaurant before heading back to the Marquis Theatre to watch the evening performance.

Ask Tesori how long she has been working on "Thoroughly Modern Millie," and she responds, "45 inches," which happens to be the current height of her 4-year-old daughter, Siena.

The youngster was born as Tesori joined the "Millie" project, which has been percolating since the early 1990s under the guidance of book writer and lyricist Dick Scanlan. He started the project with the author of the original screenplay, Richard Morris, who has since died.

The movie, which was released in 1967, featured not only Andrews, but such stage performers as Carol Channing and Beatrice Lillie (in one of her rare movie appearances) as well as Mary Tyler Moore before she was television's Mary Richards. On Broadway, newcomer Sutton Foster is Millie, with Sheryl Lee Ralph, one of the original "Dreamgirls," in Channing's role.

At first, the show's creative team wanted to use period songs, hits of the day, for this Roaring '20s tale of a young woman who arrives in New York determined to find a career as well as romance, preferably with a man who has money.

Bringing Tesori into the show was the idea of director Michael Mayer. When Mayer joined the production, there was no composer — just those period numbers and songs from the movie. He immediately thought of Tesori to help out. She had been an artistic adviser on another musical on which he had worked, "Triumph of Love." Plus, he was a big fan of "Violet," which won a New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best musical, although it only had a short off-Broadway run in 1997.

"She was perfect for this material because of her ferocious intelligence," Mayer said. "I wanted to get Jeanine to create intros and bridges and verses to those old songs, many of which sounded like little ditties, and make the whole thing feel like a score."

As Tesori herself explains, she came aboard to "create a point of view for the music, so it didn't sound like a quilt — to unify it," she says. "But it became harder and harder to do that."

What did become clear was that Tesori and Scanlan, who got along famously at their first meeting, should write more songs.

Today, the score is mostly those new songs plus a few standards and two numbers from the movie, including the title song by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn.

"Dick and I probably have written over 40 songs for this show," Tesori said. "We just rewrite and rewrite, although the story hasn't changed. I think what we discovered was that we wanted to have a real point of view to the story. Millie was driving this car, so the spine of the show, the boy meets girl story, had to start with the girl firmly established."

That meant tailoring many of the songs to Foster, who originally was the understudy. She took over as leading lady before the musical's California tryout at the La Jolla Playhouse in the fall of 2000.

"I love the connection with singers when you hear what they can do," Tesori said. "It's like tailoring a beautiful dress to them that's fitted. For example, we wrote `Gimme, Gimme,' a big song for Sutton, in two days."

Tesori has had a diverse career in the theater. Born on Long Island, she was a premed major at Barnard College (her father was a doctor) before switching to music at Columbia University. "As a child, I played field hockey and piano," she says. But musical theater never interested her.

It was not until she saw Lena Horne's one-woman Broadway show, "The Lady and Her Music," that she found herself watching the conductor, Linda Twine, with interest.

"Here was this beautiful, stately, elegant black woman conducting all those hard-core musicians," she said. "That's one of the reason I went into conducting."

Even after she found work in the pit, her friends were skeptical. "When I told them I was a conductor, some would say, `On what train line?'" she recalls with a laugh. She got jobs on Broadway, conducting such musicals as "Tommy" and "The Secret Garden" and has worked as a dance arranger, too.

It was her melodies for "Violet" — a small, affecting musical about a disfigured young Southern woman — that made critics and audiences take notice. Although the show, which had lyrics by Brian Crawley, didn't have a long New York run, it has found a second life in regional theaters. Tesori also helped raise money for the cast recording and co-produced it.

"A show is gone if it is not recorded," she says. "It was a weird gift doing the recording because from the experience, I learned what I wanted from a cast album — but it was excruciating because it is very difficult to do if there is no support from the recording industry for a show."

"Millie" won't suffer the same fate. RCA Victor has committed to the recording, which will be available in mid-June.

Two years after "Violet," Tesori was asked to write the background music for Nicholas Hytner's dreamlike production of "Twelfth Night" at Lincoln Center, and she did a recording of that, too.

"I think the more hats that you have worn, the better your work is," she says. "I like to watch and learn, to make things better."

___

On the Net:

http://www.modernmillie.com

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