No one on Broadway since Leonard Bernstein has merged together different styles quite like Yeston does. Like Bernstein, Yeston, the composer and lyricist of the Tony Award-winning musical “Nine,” is a composer with one foot in the world of serious music, the other on the Broadway stage.”
Yeston’s score for Tom Sawyer Ballet is energetic, robust, warm, deliberately naïve (both ornery and innocent), in ways right for Twain. Mr. Yeston’s tuneful music with sonorities and harmonies that recall Copland, Barber and Prokofiev (“Romeo and Juliet”) ranges easily from comic to sinister, from Muff Potter’s drunkenness to a rich celebration of the Mississippi River.”