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It's Rodgers redux

A modern musical with a classic theme - matters of the heart - is composed by a man with credentials: the grandson of Richard Rodgers.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published November 6, 2005

	[Times photo: Chris Militscher]
	Adam Guettel, who did the music and lyrics for The Light in the Piazza, chose the story because he wanted to do a love story but one with a twist. "It satisfies all the basic requirements of a romantic story without falling into the cliches," he said.

AT A GLANCE: The Light in the Piazza is slated to run through March 26 at Lincoln Center Theater, 150 W 65th St., New York. Show times are 8 p.m. Tue.-Sat.; 2 p.m. Wed. and Sat.; 3 p.m. Sun. Tickets are $65-$100. Call Tele-charge toll-free at 1-800-432-7250. The original Broadway cast CD is on Nonesuch, $19.98.

NEW YORK - For anyone interested in the future of musical theater, The Light in the Piazza is required viewing, or listening on the original cast CD. If the story it tells, of an American mother and daughter touring Italy in 1953, sometimes seems too rarified and elusive for a Broadway show, the music is ravishing.

From the shimmering harp and strings that begin the overture, the score is a throwback to golden age classics like Carousel or She Loves Me, but with a complex, sweetly dissonant undertone that is all its own.

There's a reason for its resonance with musicals past. Composer and lyricist Adam Guettel is, literally, heir to the glorious legacy of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Guettel, 40, is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, and The Light in the Piazza is his first show on Broadway.

It's something of a truism that musicals, at least the successful ones, have to be about love, from Marian the librarian waiting for the perfect guy to come along in The Music Man to the married couples of Company. Guettel was attracted by a twist on the formula when he chose to adapt the novella by Elizabeth Spencer, which was suggested by his mother, Mary Rodgers, a composer herself who wrote the music to Once Upon a Mattress.

"I was looking for a romance, but I didn't want it to be so standard and so predictable that people would put their focus on the wrong things," said Guettel, whose previous shows include the offbeat Floyd Collins, a chamber musical about a Kentucky coal miner buried alive in a cave-in, and the song cycle Myths and Hymns.

"I wanted to focus on character and detail. This story appealed to me because it's a love story that is sort of off-axis. It satisfies all the basic requirements of a romantic story without falling into the cliches."

Spencer's novella, first published in the New Yorker in 1960 and later in book form, is about Margaret Johnson, a middle-age woman from Winston-Salem, N.C., who takes her lovely grown daughter Clara to Florence for a vacation. There Clara falls in love at first sight with Fabrizio, a young Italian who retrieves her straw hat after it is bumped from her head one day in the Piazza della Signoria.

Clara, as portrayed by Kelli O'Hara, is a sunny ingenue right off a 1950s cover of Mademoiselle, singing the luminous title song and The Beauty Is, an exuberant ode to "Italy . . . the land of naked marble boys."

The twist is that Clara, however normal she appears to be, is mentally and emotionally disabled, the result of being kicked in the head as a child by a Shetland pony. Margaret's conflict over her need to protect Clara while also wanting her daughter to have her own life gives the mother a nuanced maturity that is unusual for musical theater and superbly realized in Victoria Clark's Tony Award-winning performance.

Margaret's Fable, the musical's finale, is a heartfelt aria to letting go:

Love, if you can, oh my Clara,

Love if you can and be loved

May it last forever

Guettel first worked on the musical with Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy, writing the book, but their collaboration didn't click. Then he tried doing the music, lyrics and book all by himself, he said, "and it was too lonely." He was ready to give the project up when he played some of the music he had written for playwright Craig Lucas.

"He was very anxious, and had painted himself into a corner," Lucas said.

Lucas, author of the hit plays Prelude to a Kiss and Reckless and the screenplay for Longtime Companion, urged Guettel not to abandon the musical, and the composer eventually asked him to become the book writer. The challenge of the book was to go back and forth between Clara, in the throes of young love, and her mother, whose marriage to a cigarette company executive back in North Carolina, has cooled.

"The novella is all through Margaret's eyes, and the love story between Clara and Fabrizio is viewed from without," Lucas said. "But Adam entered the story through Clara. For the show to have dimension, it had to continually come back to Margaret's perspective. So we had to get inside Clara's experience and go there with Clara, and then step back and see it from Margaret's point of view. That's the tension in the piece. It was not, at any point, easy."

It's not hard to figure out what they're saying, and the Italian gives the score an operatic flavor, especially in ensemble numbers like the five-voice Aiutami and the even busier Octet.

One of the most remarkable songs in the show is Dividing Day, Margaret's melancholy musing on love lost between her and her husband. It and The Joy You Feel, in which Fabrizio's sister-in-law, Franca (Sarah Uriarte Berry), warns Clara about the disappointments of marriage, come midway through the first act. Guettel sees those two numbers as a turning point in the drama after a largely buoyant beginning.

"It's when we dig into the lower levels, the deeper parts of the show," he said. "But we had to play it very safe. We have four numbers that are sort of frothy and inviting before we get into that."

Lucas directed the first tryout of the show, in Seattle in 2003. Sher took over the direction of a second production, in Chicago, and then on Broadway.

The Light in the Piazza, which won the Tony in June for best new musical, continues to hold its own at the Lincoln Center Theater, playing to strong enough attendance to extend the originally limited run into 2006. A national tour is being discussed, but nothing definite has been announced. There was a 1962 movie made from the novella, starring Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux and Rossano Brazzi, but none of the musical's creators had seen it. "We deliberately avoided it," Guettel said. "We didn't want to have our psyches invaded by their approach to the material. I think, in retrospect, that was probably a mistake. I probably would have gotten some good ideas from the movie. But it was a more pure experience, going direct from the book to the stage."

Spencer, the novella's author, said that mainly because of the movie, she had received quite a few inquiries over the years about turning the story into a musical, but the rights were held by a former agent of hers until the 1990s. After regaining control of the rights, she chose Guettel's proposal over others.

"I thought Adam had the backing plus the tenacious streak," said Spencer, 84, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C. "If he starts anything he's going to finish it - that kind of feeling I had about him turned out to be true."

Spencer had a role in the making of The Light in the Piazza. She attended each of the three productions, and her suggestions were helpful. "After Chicago, she felt the design was close but not really there, so we listened hard to that," Sher said. "She had other responses to characters in terms of how they were being expressed; they were subtle but very insightful. She's a gentle but deeply wise person."

Spencer, born in Mississippi, was a writer of real consequence in her heyday, but she has been somewhat forgotten as her books have slipped out of mainstream commercial publishing into academic presses. Her eight novels include The Voice at the Back Door (1956), about racial tensions in the South, and The Snare (1972), a tale of a young woman in New Orleans.

One of her best novels, and well worth reading in these hurricane-heavy times, is The Salt Line (1984), which takes place on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Camille. Her latest book was a memoir of being brought up in the South and becoming a writer, Landscapes of the Heart (1998).

The Light in the Piazza, one of a group of stories Spencer wrote with Italian settings, is her most popular work and has never been out of print. She lived in Italy for five years in the 1950s.

"I think I've written better stories than The Light in the Piazza, but somehow or other it seems to touch people and gets hold of them in a very curious way," Spencer said. "It could be viewed as a sort of tragic story, but I looked on it as a fairly light work. What interested me in doing it was that Italian perceptions of things and people are different than the perceptions that Americans brought to that culture. That's where the meat of the story seems to lie."

Spencer, who has written one play, For Lease or Sale (1989), does not consider herself an expert on musical theater, but she is thrilled by what Guettel and Lucas did with The Light in the Piazza.

"I haven't really liked many Broadway musicals in recent years," she said. "I used to be the kind that loved Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady and stuff like that. This seems to me a return to the feeling you got from having a real story with real people. To me it feels like an operetta."

-- John Fleming can be reached at 727 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 3, 2005, 12:08:03]