Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Stage

A 'Piazza' full of possibility

For Christine Andreas, her role in the musical The Light in the Piazza is one she embraces offstage as well: letting go, moving on and finding the next phase of life.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published October 1, 2006

Christine Andreas finds more than a few parallels between her life and The Light in the Piazza, the Tony Award-winning musical that she is starring in.

For one thing, the composer and lyricist of the show is Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers. Andreas' favorite role "If I had to choose one" was Laurey in a 1979 Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. She also was in another Rodgers show on Broadway, playing songwriter Frankie Frayne in a revival of the ballet musical On Your Toes in 1983. Both performances earned her Tony nominations.

But where Andreas feels most connected to The Light in the Piazza, which opens this week at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, is through the character she is portraying, Margaret Johnson, a North Carolinian on extended vacation in Italy with her daughter, Clara, in the 1950s. Clara is a gorgeous young woman, but she is arrested emotionally, the result of being kicked by a pony when she was 12.

"I have a special needs kid, so I have a certain inside track," Andreas said recently from Orlando, where the show was playing.

Andreas' 19-year-old son, Mac, "was oxygen-deprived at birth," she said. "So there's mental retardation. He has a little autism, a little cerebral palsy, a little epilepsy, attention deficit. He's arrested around the age of 4. But all that said, he's lovely and happy in his life now."

After Mac's birth, Andreas scaled back her career. She has done more concerts than musicals in the past two decades.

"I've been really rigorous about balancing my family life and my career," she said. "I'm trying to live guilt-free, and that's not an easy task when you're a mothering artist."

Several months ago, Andreas moved her son into a group home 15 minutes from her house in Croton on Hudson, outside New York City. "I put him there because he wanted his independence and was basically letting me know that for a couple of years. I just put out a prayer, and a place opened up," she said.

Andreas, married to composer Martin Silvestri, also has a 19-year-old stepdaughter, Emilie, a student at George Washington University.

The dramatic crisis in The Light in the Piazza, which is based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer, comes when Clara falls in love with a young Florentine. As Margaret struggles with allowing her daughter to have her own life, she sings The Beauty Is:

So much being patient.

So much blind acceptance . . .

So much holding breath and keeping fingers crossed.

"I understand all that from a deep level," Andreas said. "Clara is putting things together. She's becoming her own woman. I'm standing there watching her transform. It's everything a parent would wish, whether it's a special kid or a typical kid. You wish them their own experience, their own life, their own individuality. You want to let them go. I watch her do that, and sometimes I put my son's face there."

Victoria Clark won a Tony for playing Margaret on Broadway. Andreas saw Clark's performance while preparing for the tour, which began in San Francisco in August, but stopped watching after two shows "because she was so powerful." Recently she looked at a tape of the musical that was broadcast live on PBS to "see if Vicki was getting certain laughs and how she was doing it."

"I saw how different she was," Andreas said. "It's totally another person, totally valid, but I'm not that person."

Clark is from North Carolina, where Margaret is from. "Vicki is very much an embodiment of a North Carolina matron. I'm a little more airy," said Andreas, who grew up in New Jersey and New York.

Vocally, she said, "Vicki is more legit-sounding. I have a lighter, more pop sort of voice."

Andreas' radiant soprano can be heard on the recently reissued CD of the 20th anniversary production of My Fair Lady, in which she played Eliza Doolittle opposite Ian Richardson's Henry Higgins.

Making the transition from playing ingenues like Eliza, Laurey and Frankie to more mature roles like Margaret can be treacherous.

"You hope there are going to be roles for you," Andreas said. "It was wonderful and I loved them (ingenues), but I always wanted to do the leading lady parts. When you're an ingenue, you're always discovering life, and you're always on the brink of finding what it's all about. That's true in any part, but as an adult, you have a lot more information. Playing adult roles, you're either working through what you think you know and you discover isn't so, or you're learning something new but on a more mature level, with a lot more stuff going on. It's juicier."

With her son and stepdaughter on their own and her husband able to travel with her, Andreas feels fortunate to be on the road with The Light in the Piazza.

"A lot of artists don't like to tour," she said. "But I thought this would be such a great way to begin this new phase of my life, with my son moving on, Emilie moving on. Who am I going to be now? Watch out, world."

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

[Last modified September 29, 2006, 11:14:41]