Little Women's big man: as his hit opera Little Women debuts in New York, composer Mark Adamo talks about bringing theatrical spice to the classical world and living happily ever after with his partner, composer John Corigliano. (music).

"I would like to think that I had insight into the women in Little Women because I wasn't bound by gender roles," says Mark Adamo, musing about his triumphant hit opera, which opens March 23 at New York City Opera at Lincoln Center in a joint production with Glimmerglass Opera. "On the other hand," he says, "maybe the answer is that I had two sisters and we grew up in the same house!"

Whatever its genesis, Little Women has enjoyed 22 productions in less than five years--as it has astounded critics and endeared audiences to Adamo's vividly drawn characters. "A lot of that dialogue was from my family," Adamo allows. "A straight guy might have done that too."

In fact, Louisa May Alcott's classic novel has often been adapted. But neither the three Hollywood films nor the musical versions fully succeeded in capturing the book's soulful magic while retaining its Victorian-era charm. Rather than ignoring the past efforts, Adamo studied them before beginning his opera, for which he also served as librettist.

"I was trained as a playwright as well as a composer," says Adamo, who was in the dramatic writing program at New York University and then the music composition program at Catholic University of America. "So I'm able to write as knowingly from the theatrical point of view as from the musical point of view."

To translate the novel into the language t)f opera, Adamo focused on the character of Jo March--the most headstrong of the book's four March sisters--and her reluctance to grow old and leave the bonds of family. "Perfect as we are" becomes her motivation as well as her leitmotiv--and receives a melodic treatment that echoes "No One Is Alone," a memorable tune by another composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim.

Like many classical musicians, Adamo becomes thoughtful when questions turn to matters of sexuality. "I was surprised at how relatively square and quasi-conservative the concert-music world seemed in comparison to the theater world, which was much looser and funnier," he says. "If [the world of theater] was political, it [leaned] distinctly left. And being gay was sort of assumed."

As he moved into the world of classical music at Catholic University, Adamo discovered that the campus politics, sexual and otherwise, were more conservative. "I suppose a class at C.U. was the wrong place to make a flippant remark about Benjamin Briten's `Oh, this beautiful boy will be the death of me' operas," says Adamo, still laughing at the frosty reception he received. "But I thought it was the most obvious observation in the world!"

Adamo's down-to-earth sensibility has proved to be one of his strengths as a composer. "Mark has a lyric gift, yet he clearly is in the tradition of 20th-century composers who came before him," says New York City Opera's Paul Kellogg. "Little Women is both accessible and sophisticated."

One critic actually dubbed Little Women "the new Amahl," likening it to Gian Carlo Menotti's classic Amahl and the Night Visitors. The Menotti comparison is doubly apt: Menotti was the lover of an older composer, Samuel Barber--and since 1995, Adamo, 40; has been in a relationship with the Oscar- and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano, who is 25 years his senior.

"Our age difference is actually a plus, because it takes away any possibility of rivalry," Adamo says. There's also the fact that Adamo focuses on music for the theater--he's now at work on an operatic setting of the Greek tragedy Lysistrata--while Corigliano writes mainly for orchestra. This winter the two spent their days toiling away at new scores at their country home in upstate New York. Was it stressful to have two artists hard at work under one roof?. Not at all, insists Adamo. "John's studio faces the lake," he says, "and I face the woods."

Dalton is a music critic for the Albany, N. Y., Times Union.