A&E

There's a lot of behind-the-scenes talent, from the set designer to the master electrician, that goes into any theatrical production. But you don't always expect the credits on a playbill to include composer.

"Especially with a period piece or a classic, you're really trying to create a world, and so much of that is the sound design and the music," says David Ira Goldstein, artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company, who commissioned original music for the season-opening Enchanted April, about four English women on a trip to Italy in 1922.

Minneapolis composer Roberta Carlson has added her aural touch to many of the company's shows through the years, including the world premieres of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure.

"It is the interdisciplinary side of theater that attracts me, that it is such a partnership between everyone involved, the director, the designer, the cast," says Carlson, who grew up in the Phoenix area and has known Goldstein since he played trombone for her in the pit of a children's theater production back in Minnesota, when he was still in high school.

Composing for the stage is an exacting process: Carlson actually attends rehearsals with a stopwatch in hand.

"Scene transitions have to take you out of the emotional tenor of a previous scene and into a different time and location, all the while considering how long will it actually take them to change the scene, change a costume, whatever," she says. "You have to keep the play moving forward at the same time that you're trying to produce something that's emotionally and artistically right for the moment."

And then, of course, there's the ephemeral nature of a work of art that disappears after the curtain falls the final time.

"Many productions are so idiosyncratic that the score that you write won't be heard again," Carlson says. "That's why so many people, including actors, have very concrete hobbies. (For me) it used to be needlepoint, until my eye doctor said, 'If you're going to write music, you might want to take up a hobby that doesn't work your eyes so much.' "

One of Carlson's strengths, Goldstein says, is a facility with a variety of musical styles. It's a tribute not only to her training, but to a natural talent; as a child, she says, she thought everybody had perfect pitch. It seemed so unremarkable that she didn't envision a career in music until she was already in college, studying political science.

When she decided she wanted to change majors, her parents were not happy, she says.

"My dear departed mother, bless her heart, burst into tears and said, 'We never would have spent all that money on piano lessons if we'd known you were going to take it seriously.' "

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.