John Gromada is a prolific, award-winning composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 and sound designer. He is best known for his many scores for theatrical productions in New York on and off-Broadway and in regional theatres. Broadway plays he has scored include Next Fall (play)

Next Fall (play)

Next Fall is a play written by Geoffrey Nauffts. The play is about two gay men in a committed relationship with a twist, with one being devoutly religious and the other an atheist. The play revolves around their five-year relationship and how they make it work despite their differences...

, Chazz Palminteri

Chazz Palminteri

Calogero Lorenzo "Chazz" Palminteri is an American actor and writer, best known for his performances in The Usual Suspects, A Bronx Tale, and his Academy Award nominated role for Best Supporting Actor in Bullets Over Broadway....

's A Bronx Tale

A Bronx Tale

A Bronx Tale is a 1993 American crime drama film set in The Bronx during the turbulent era of the 1960s. It was the directorial debut of Robert De Niro, and follows a young Italian-American teenager as his path in life is guided by two father figures, played by De Niro and Chazz Palminteri...

, David Auburn

David Auburn

David Auburn is an American playwright.He was raised in Ohio and Arkansas. He attended the University of Chicago, where he was a member of Off-Off Campus, and received a degree in English literature....

's Proof

Proof (play)

Proof is a play by David Auburn originally produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club on 23 May 2000. It then went to Broadway on 24 October 2000 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, and was directed by Daniel J. Sullivan, with Mary-Louise Parker as Catherine, Larry Bryggman as Robert, Ben Shenkman as Hal, and...

, Lisa Kron's Well, Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole is a play written by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play was originally commissioned by South Coast Repertory and first presented at its Pacific Playwrights Festival reading series in 2005...

, and A Few Good Men ; revivals of Prelude to a Kiss, Summer and Smoke

Summer and Smoke

Summer and Smoke is a two-part, thirteen-scene play by Tennessee Williams, originally titled Chart of Anatomy when Williams began work on it in 1945. In 1964, Williams revised the play as The Eccentricities of a Nightingale...

, Twelve Angry Men and A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire (play)

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play written by American playwright Tennessee Williams for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948. The play opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947, and closed on December 17, 1949, in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The Broadway production was...

. His score for the nine hour production of Horton Foote

Horton Foote

Albert Horton Foote, Jr. was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television...

's The Orphans Home Cycle was featured at the Hartford Stage Company and Signature Theatre in New York.

Gromada first emerged on the theatre scene in the late 1980s creating powerful soundscores blending original music and abstract sound design. His industrial music score for Sophie Treadwell's Machinal

Machinal

Machinal is a play written by American playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell, inspired by the real life case of convicted and executed murderess Ruth Snyder...

at the New York Shakespeare Festival

New York Shakespeare Festival

New York Shakespeare Festival is the previous name of the New York City theatrical producing organization now known as the Public Theater. The Festival produced shows at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, as part of its free Shakespeare in the Park series, at the Public Theatre near Astor Place...

 earned him a Village Voice Obie Award

Obie Award

The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York City...

 in 1991. In 1996 he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Sound Design

Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Sound Design

The Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Sound Design is presented by the Drama Desk, a committee of New York City theatre critics, writers, and editors. It honors the sound designers of productions staged on Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and for legitimate not-for-profit theaters, all...

 for his musique concrète

Musique concrète

Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...

 soundscore for Caryl Churchill's The Skriker

The Skriker

The Skriker is a 1994 play by Caryl Churchill that tells the story of an ancient fairy who, during the course of the play, transforms into a plethora of objects and people as it pursues Lily and Josie, two teenage mothers whom it befriends, manipulates, seduces and entraps...

, directed by Mark Wing-Davey

Mark Wing-Davey

Mark Wing-Davey is a British actor and director.-Early life and career:The son of actor and actress Peter Davey and Anna Wing, Wing-Davey went to school at Woolverstone Hall School, before studying at Cambridge University where he was a member of the Footlights from 1967 to 1970.He had a featured...

 for NYSF.

In recent years he has also become known for his lyrical, acoustic chamber scores, particularly for his work on the plays of Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...

. Williams plays he has scored include The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie is a four-character memory play by Tennessee Williams. Williams worked on various drafts of the play prior to writing a version of it as a screenplay for MGM, to whom Williams was contracted...

, A Streetcar Named Desire, Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth is a 1959 play by Tennessee Williams which tells the story of a gigolo and drifter, Chance Wayne, who returns to his home town as the accompaniment of a faded movie star, Princess Kosmonopolis , whom he hopes to use to help him break into the movies...

, The Night of the Iguana

The Night of the Iguana

The Night of the Iguana is a stageplay written by American author Tennessee Williams, based on his 1948 short story. The play premiered on Broadway in 1961. Two film adaptations have been made, including the Academy Award-winning 1964 film of the same name....

, Camino Real

Camino Real (play)

Camino Real is a 1953 play by Tennessee Williams. In the introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, Williams directs the reader to use the Anglicized pronunciation "Cá-mino Réal." The play takes its title from its setting, alluded to El Camino Real, a dead-end place in a Spanish-speaking town...

, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a play by Tennessee Williams. One of Williams's best-known works and his personal favorite, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955...

, Summer and Smoke, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is a play written by Tennessee Williams.It debuted at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, in July 1962. Its first American production was in January 1963, but it only ran for 69 performances at the Morosco Theatre in New York. Reviews of the play...

and Red Devil Battery Sign.

In 2009 Gromada began to write the score for a new music theatre piece based on Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. A 2006 New York Times book review describes him as a "liberal foodie intellectual."...

's best-selling book, The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World is a 2001 nonfiction book by journalist Michael Pollan. This work explores the nature of domesticated plants from the dual perspective of humans and the plants themselves...

, which had a first workshop in Berkeley in April, 2009.

In the summer of 2011, his score for the Public Theater

Public Theater

The Public Theater is a New York City arts organization founded as The Shakespeare Workshop in 1954 by Joseph Papp, with the intention of showcasing the works of up-and-coming playwrights and performers. It is headquartered at 425 Lafayette Street in the former Astor Library in the East Village...

's production of Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1603 or 1604. It was classified as comedy, but its mood defies those expectations. As a result and for a variety of reasons, some critics have labelled it as one of Shakespeare's problem plays...

can be heard at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. The production is directed by David Esbjornson

David Esbjornson

David Esbjornson is an award-winning director and producer who has worked throughout the United States in regional theatres and on Broadway, and has established strong and productive relationships with some of the profession’s top playwrights, actors, and companies...

.

Gromada composed the theme music for the new Granada USA television series, The Interrogators, on the Biography Channel.

External links

• Official Website
• John Gromada at the Lortel Off-Broadway Database