GRABBING HIS MOMENT

By BY RICHARD ZOGLIN

Anyone who writes music for songs with titles like This Is the Moment and Once Upon a Dream is hardly likely to be a gloomy Gus. But Frank Wildhorn just may be Broadway's most happy fella. A virtual unknown on the Great White Way nine months ago, he is the composer of two musicals, Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel, which have survived mostly scathing reviews to become box-office successes. A self-described "blue-collar professional songwriter" who has supplied material for the likes of Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston, he now has enough theater projects to keep him busy into the next millennium, and maybe the one after that. His favorite star, Linda Eder, is also his live-in companion--and next May will become his wife. "I wake up every morning," he attests, "and say, 'I'm the luckiest guy in the world.'"

Except possibly those mornings the reviews for his shows come out. With the apparent end of Andrew Lloyd Webber's string of hits, Wildhorn has taken over as the middlebrow melodist critics love to hate. His soaring ballads are dismissed as bland pop geared for easy-listening radio; his shows are scorned as cut-rate imitations of Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. ("The man writes galumphing, dunderheaded musicals that make...everything by Andrew Lloyd Webber seem like great art"--Newsday.) But he is a musical populist and proud of it. "Lyrics can be hard to grasp," he says. "If the music isn't comfortable on the ear and doesn't let the audience flow with it, you can miss a lot." Says Pimpernel producer Kathleen Raitt: "Nobody but the public loves his music."

Well, let's try. His shows, to be sure, seldom rise above pleasant kitsch. Jekyll & Hyde is a sluggish retelling of the famous horror tale with hair-flinging histrionics by star Robert Cuccioli; The Scarlet Pimpernel is so cheesily staged that the hero's main feat of derring-do is to pose as a plague victim so all the villains will flee in fear. Yet Wildhorn's music has enough muscle and melody to lift the material and the spirits. He can get our blood flowing with a rousing fight song (Into the Fire in Pimpernel) or brighten a brittle critique of social mores with an infectious melodic motif (Facade in Jekyll). Even when his ballads bog down in gooey lyrics (by Leslie Bricusse in Jekyll; Nan Knighton in Pimpernel), the simple but affecting tunes can stick with you. And if they get played on the radio, why not? "There are times when the emotions transcend the moment in the show," Wildhorn explains. "When that happens, a songwriter says, 'Go for it.' "

He's going for it in a big way. Wildhorn's next project is The Civil War, a "dramatic emotional tapestry" for which he has set to music letters, diaries and other documents from the war. It will be released, as usual, first as an album (performed by artists ranging from Trisha Yearwood to Hootie & the Blowfish), then as a TV special, and finally a stage show. After that: Havana, a "musical comedy noir" set in the 1940s; a musical version of Alice in Wonderland; and Svengali, the second (after Jekyll) in what he envisions as a gothic trilogy.

An affable New Yorker whose Jewish family lived in Harlem, the Bronx and Queens before moving to Florida when he was a teenager, Wildhorn, 39, didn't discover music until he was 15, when he started noodling on the family organ in between football practices. While a student at the University of Southern California, he started writing Jekyll & Hyde with a classmate; an album of songs from the show was released in 1990, and shortly thereafter it was staged at Houston's Alley Theatre. The musical then sat unproduced for several years while its songs worked their way into the pop mainstream: This Is the Moment has turned up at everything from the Winter Olympics to President Clinton's Inaugural. Remounted in 1995, the show became a cult hit around the country before landing on Broadway last spring.

Pimpernel followed a similar course, with a concept album and a Top 40 single (You Are My Home) before reaching the stage. Wildhorn gets positively woozy about the way his music affects audiences: aids patients write to thank him for the inspiration they get from A New Life, a song from Jekyll & Hyde. And as for those critics? Friends send him copies of early bad reviews of Puccini and Verdi operas to make him feel better. "There's a tendency to get bitter and cynical, but I'm not going to do that," he says. "I've got too much joy."