A team with a view: William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein build bridges from cabaret to grand opera.(musical collaboration between composer, librettist )

Like many good American stories, this one starts in Paris, where the young Seattle-born composer William Bolcom was studying composition at the Conservatoire with Darius Milhaud. One day, the eminent French composer told Bolcom that he had received an interesting libretto from a young American poet. "But it would be more suitable for you," Milhaud said, handing him the script in its transit-battered cover. Bolcom looked at the work's peculiar tide: Dynamite Tonight. He read the first page. "Then and there," he recalls, "I knew I wanted to set it."

That was in 1960. More than four decades later, Bolcom and Dynamite Tonight's librettist, Arnold Weinstein, are still ...