To sum up a great many Broadway musicals, all you need is a sentence: It's about Eva PerĂłn. It's about the phantom of the opera. It's about cats. Sometimes you need a sentence with a commaâIt's basically La Boheme, but with crappy rockâbut rarely does a hit Broadway show defy easy description.
With The Light in the Piazza, a simple plot descriptionâin the 1950s, a young American visits Italy and falls in loveâtells you everything and nothing, and every worthy characterization of the show involves a perverse clash of ideas: It's an unabashedly hopeful romance that suggests True Love exists only between deluded, lucky, and perhaps developmentally disabled strangers. It's a romance in which every married couple is either embittered or adrift and the central love story is literally built on a lie. It's a love story that doesn't hide the ugliness of love. It's one of the most intoxicating things I've ever seen in a theater.
Like a number of local arts-related media types, I had the good fortune to watch The Light in the Piazza as it was born at Intiman Theatre in 2003. At a late-spring rehearsal in the week before opening, I watched Craig Lucas, writer of the show's book and original director, tag team with choreographer Pat Graney in navigating the first meeting of the show's young-lover leads. Who touches whom first, and where? How many steps before each turns to look back? It was small, exacting work, and on opening night, I watched as the show's accumulation of precise human gestures combined to cast an extraordinary spell.
The Light in the Piazza is based on Elizabeth Spencer's short story of the same name, which is set in 1950s Florence and centers on Margaret Johnson, the middle-aged wife of a Southern tobacco magnate, who's come to Italy with her adult daughter. When international love bloomsâaided by a significant misunderstanding that spins into a lieâPiazza becomes an exquisite, morally twisty puzzle.
Motored by an intricate, soon-to-be Tony-winning score by Adam Guettel and blessed with an intricate, soon-to-be Tony-winning lead performance by Victoria Clarke, the world premiere of The Light in the Piazza was a world-class theatrical experience, and watching its year of Broadway triumphâsix Tonys, five Drama Desk awardsâwas a thrill.
My next direct experience with The Light in the Piazza came in 2006, with the show's broadcast on PBS's Live from Lincoln Center. My usual reticence about watching theater on film was deepened by superstitious fears for the show, whose magic was so carefully wrought it almost seemed fragile, and I wasn't eager to have a cherished theatrical memory smashed by public television cameras. I needn't have worried. The PBS broadcast swept me up like the first time and more, as the genius mechanics of the showâwhat's said, what's sung, who knows what and whenâbecame crystalline. Just like the live version, the televised Piazza delivered the heady thrills of a Jane Austen novel on the wings of Guettel's gorgeous score, and I began to wonder if the show was the opposite of fragile: an artistic creation so expertly conceived it would retain its magic whenever and wherever it's performed.
Last week brought the opportunity to test my theory, as the first official touring production of The Light in the Piazza arrived for a two-week run at Seattle's Paramount Theatre. Watching the opening-night performance, at first all I noticed were differencesâprimarily the casting of Christine Andreas in the lead. Having twice witnessed Clarke's brilliantly lived-in Margaret, I was initially put off by Andreas's coarser rendering of the role. Her Margaret is a much uglier American, boasting a hammier accent and half the intellect of Clarke's, but when Andreas sings, she catches up to her casting with a rich, controlled, and wonderfully expressive voice; her delivery of the role-defining "Dividing Day" was stunning.
Another musical revelation: David Burnham as the young Fabrizio Naccarelli. Hobbled by dialogue in pidgin English, Fabrizio is a tough sell, but Burnham's swoon-worthy spins through Guettel's Italian arias do the trick. The touring cast is strong and, give or take a few nuances, the show works as well as it always has, with credit to its creators. Lucas's book is a masterful construct that unfolds almost of its own accord, grippingly, with the accumulation of details making each scene more poignant than the one before. Guettel's ravishing score plays off the structure brilliantly. The result is a musical that feels like a new American classic. Go see it.
