[The tour of The Light in the Piazza played the Fox Theatre here in St. Louis January 31st through February 11th, 2007. This is the text of my review for public radio station KDHX-FM.]
Corporate Broadway, like corporate Hollywood, has become a place for high-stakes gambling, where big producers spend bigger money on huge shows in the expectation of massive returns on their investments. It's a gargantuan theme park, relying on a steady stream of money from tourists who have been told, by corporate media, to expect those huge shows.
In such an environment, it's remarkable that a modest, romantic show like Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza was produced at all. That it also ran over 500 performances and garnered a raft of awards in the process is downright miraculous.
So is its appearance here at the Fox. Like the tourists at the Broadway Theme Park, Fox audiences have come to expect expensive blockbusters on that outsized stage. Choosing a beautiful and subtle show like Light shows that someone at Fox Associates has taste and courage, both of which should be saluted.
Based on Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella of the same name, The Light in the Piazza is the story of Margaret Johnson (Christine Andreas through February 8th, then Jane Brockman), an upper crust South Carolina matron traveling in Italy in 1953 with her daughter Clara (Leslie Henstock through February 4th, then Elena Shaddow). As they're admiring the naked statues in Firenze (that's Florence to us Anglos), Clara's straw hat is blown off by a fateful gust of wind and retrieved by Fabrizio, a young apprentice in his father's tie shop. David Burhnam, promoted from his position as an ensemble member in the Broadway production, plays the role here.
Fabrizio and Clara are instantly smitten with each other, but there are obstacles. Clara may be 26, but a riding accident as a child has left her with the emotional maturity of someone half her age. Trying to protect her daughter, Margaret does her best to keep the lovers apart. When that inevitably fails, Margaret has to come to terms with the flowering of her daughter's identity, the withering of her own marriage, and the future they all must face.
The cast for this tour is just plain flawless. Ms. Henstock and Ms. Andreas are (to quote a line penned by Guettel's mentor, Stephen Sondheim) “a practically perfect pair”* as Clara and Margaret. Ms. Henstock nicely captures Clara's hidden child without sacrificing the woman, and Ms. Andreas is beautifully sympathetic as her conflicted mother.
Mr. Burnham is all boyish enthusiasm as Fabrizio and handles his soaring melodic lines with ease. There are fine performances also from Jonathan Hammond as Fabrizio's older, but less mature, brother Giuseppe and Wendi Bergamini as Giuseppe's wife Franca, torn between love and anger.
Evangelia Kingsley has a show-stopping moment at the top of the second act as the leader of the impassioned Italian quintet, “Aiutami”, reminding us that, in love “risk is everything”. Her operatic background is evident in her strong contralto. David Ledingham completes the list of principals with a wise and witty Signor Naccarelli.
The book, by noted playwright Craig Lucas, handles this tale of “love among the ruins” with great warmth and, when appropriate, good humor. The characters are beautifully drawn and their relationships crystal clear, even when a scene or an entire song is in Italian.
The score, by third-generation theatre composer Adam Guettel, is lavish and romantic without being saccharine. The musically sophisticated songs are so well integrated with the book that that the show feels, in retrospect, like one continuous aria, some of which just happens to be spoken rather than sung. The illusion is enhanced by the score's heavy reliance on the strings and harp, as opposed to the winds and synthesizer typical of other recent shows. The effect is, if you'll pardon the over-used word, luminous.
But then, light is the underlying theme of this piece. Specifically, it's the warm, golden light of what Margaret calls “a city in the sun”. It's manifested in Michael Yeargan's airy and flexible set (enabling fast and fluid scene changes) and in Christopher Akerlind's lighting, which evokes mellow, autumnal or (in the one brief Roman scene) harsh moods as required.
Bartlett Sher's direction pulls it all together into one seamless whole and moves everything along at a brisk pace without ever seeming rushed. At only two and one-half hours including a thirty-minute intermission, The Light in the Piazza is relatively short by recent mega-musical standards, but it's long on believable human drama.
The Light in the Piazza will be warming our frigid winter nights through February 11th [2007] at the Fox in Grand Center. For ticket information, call 314-534-1111. Since this isn't anything like a theme park musical, you should be able to get good seats for most shows, and intelligent entertainment like this deserves our support.
*It's from Do I Hear a Waltz?, from 1965; another show about a middle-aged American woman dealing with romance in Italy, this time with music by Guettel's grandfather, Richard Rodgers.
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