Returning romance to the musical
Adam Guettel was looking for love. Something complicated and intense. Real love, you could call it, the kind of feeling that hits hard but is hardly unfettered, the sort that fills the heart and troubles the mind. Guettel — a noted composer and lyricist, and the grandson of musical theater legend Richard Rodgers — wanted to tell a love story. His mother, Mary Rodgers, recommended a novella by Elizabeth Spencer, first published in the New Yorker, called “The Light in the Piazza.”
“It was nuanced and atypical,” says Guettel, “while still giving us a sense of the fullness of the experience. It was a perfect little vessel.”
“The Light in the Piazza” — with a lush, sophisticated score by Guettel , 42, and a witty, whimsical book by Craig Lucas — opened at Lincoln Center in April 2005 for a scheduled three-month run and stayed for more than a year, picking up six Tony Awards along the way. The show is set in the summer of 1953 in Florence , where Margaret Johnson, a disenchanted matron from North Carolina, is travel ing with her daughter Clara, a lovely but curiously childlike 26-year-old. Clara and Fabrizio, a high-spirited Florentine, fall head over heels in love despite the language barrier, cultural clashes, and Margaret’s determined efforts to keep them apart.
In its finest moments, and there are more than a few of them, Guettel’s music is ravishing. The story is beautifully textured, the sets and costumes radiant. But “The Light in the Piazza,” which opens at the Colonial Theatre on Tuesday, is also notable for what it doesn’t have: the big stars, eye-popping spectacle, or jukebox tunes that are the dominant fashion and the economic driver of mainstream 21st - century musicals. Irony is nowhere to be found. The show’s earnestness would seem downright retro if it didn’t also feel utterly novel.
“Many stories are told through a gauze of defensive cynicism,” says Guettel, whose previous work includes “Floyd Collins” and “Myths and Hymns,” a song cycle. “I admire cynicism less and less. I’m not pretending I’m carving some new niche here, I’m just one of the people who likes to be direct. I hadn’t done a love story, and it hadn’t been done in a genuine way in a while.”
The creative burden for Guettel — who’s among a small handful of composer/lyricists considered heir to Stephen Sondheim’s arty musical theater throne — was to find a musical language to describe the indescribable. He wanted to give a roomful of strangers the feeling of falling in love, so he wrote songs that are by turns as graceful and tender, as dissonant and passionate and knotty as the subject itself. While “The Light in the Piazza” opened to mixed reviews, the show’s success seems to confirm that there is indeed an audience for a love story that neither panders nor patronizes.
This no doubt came as a surprise to the many investors who couldn’t bring themselves to bet on an old-fashioned romance with an elegant score.
“We had all these Broadway producers come to [the pre-Broadway run in] Chicago and kvell and invite us to meet with them in New York, and everybody pretty much fell away,” Guettel recalls. “It’s not a blockbuster based on a famous property. It’s not a quirky, hip , off-Broadway transfer. It didn’t resemble anything and I don’t think people wanted to risk six million bucks on something they didn’t know how to market. Luckily Lincoln Center was there to produce us. The patronage system saved [us ].”
Since the show closed at Lincoln Center last July, the North American touring company has been crisscrossing the country with a cast that includes 22-year-old Katie Rose Clarke, who made her Broadway debut as Clara for seven months in New York. Clarke finds the show “dangerously honest. It’s such an emotionally open show, and getting to that place every night can be hard.”
David Burnham, who co stars as Fabrizio, also made his Broadway debut as an understudy in the role. He says that “Piazza” requires its audience to be as engaged as the actors on stage. “The play is successful because of its nuance and subtlety. The music is demanding. It’s a show that asks the audience to sit forward and listen for two hours and that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But most of the time people take the journey with us.”
Thanks to the contributions of Craig Lucas, the show is a comedy of manners as well as period romance. After an initial collaboration with playwright Alfred Uhry (”Driving Miss Daisy”) failed to take off, Guettel called Lucas, author of “Prelude to a Kiss” and a casual friend, for advice. What he got was a new collaborator. Lucas and Guettel worked for two years on the project, for part of that time at the Sundance Theatre Lab in Utah.
Lucas was in love with Guettel’s music, but felt it was critical to leaven the story with humor.
“Otherwise, I thought it could be maudlin and self-indulgent,” says Lucas, via e - mail from the Connecticut set of the new Hilary Swank film “The Laws of Motion,” which he’s directing. “Though it has yearning and heartbreak in it, [”Piazza”] is essentially a light hearted piece.”
Lucas says he worried about whether a heart-on-sleeve show would resonate with today’s seen-it-all audiences . “But ultimately, as in all things, one must trust one’s own sense of what is worth putting out into the world, and the devil take the hindmost.”
Love doesn’t conquer all in “The Light in the Piazza.” It’s beautifully consuming, even transcendent, but when the young lovers walk off into the horizon we’re not at all certain about the happily ever after part. And we’re not meant to be.
“It’s intense, but it’s not tied in a bow,” says Guettel, who speaks from experience. He insists that his career has grown out of the imperative to make an emotional connection more than any predisposition to make art.
“I don’t know that I would even describe what I have as a talent for music per se as much as a strong passion for turning my experience into something I can share with others,” he says. “My language happens to be music.”