Preview 2004-2005: Guettel Gets to Broadway

It was composer-lyricist Adam Guettel's mother, Mary Rodgers, who first pointed his attention to Elizabeth Spencer's novella The Light in the Piazza, originally published in The New Yorker in 1960. The musical possibilities of the same Spencer book had briefly been considered by Guettel's grandfather, Richard Rodgers, and his partner Oscar Hammerstein II, just months before the latter's death.

Never in history has a theatre composer-lyricist with so little work produced in New York won the degree of acclaim accorded Guettel. Up to now, Guettel has had just one narrative musical presented locally, Floyd Collins, which had a month's run in 1996 at the tiny venue then in use by Playwrights Horizons. Since then, Floyd Collins has had a life around the country, but Guettel's only subsequent New York show has been the Public Theatre's concert presentation of a song cycle that has gone by the titles Saturn Returns and Myths and Hymns.

But that hasn't prevented publications like The New York Times from dubbing Guettel the heir apparent to Stephen Sondheim and the potential savior of contemporary musical theatre. Now, nine years after Floyd Collins, Guettel's second book show will arrive in New York, and the occasion will also mark the composer-lyricist's long-awaited Broadway debut.

The new musical is The Light in the Piazza, and it will be presented in the spring at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre by Lincoln Center Theater. It will be the second new Broadway musical presented by the company this season, following Sondheim's The Frogs.

Light in the Piazza has had a lengthy period of gestation, which has included the coming and going of two book writers, Alfred Uhry Driving Miss Daisy, Parade and Arthur Laurents. Guettel's grandfather collaborated with Laurents on an unsuccessful Broadway musical, Do I Hear a Waltz?, that was, like Piazza, set in Italy.

Eventually coming to Guettel's rescue was playwright Craig Lucas, whose Reckless will also have its Broadway premiere this season. With Lucas taking over as librettist, The Light in the Piazza was developed at Utah's Sundance Institute Theatre Laboratory, then had its world premiere in spring 2003 at Seattle's Intiman Theatre, where it was directed by Lucas, who is also associate artistic director of Intiman. For its second production, at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in the winter of 2004, Intiman artistic director Bartlett Sher took over the staging.

Comparing a song list from the Seattle production with one from late in the Chicago run, Piazza's tunestack does not appear greatly altered. But the show changed set designers Loy Arcenas in Seattle, Michael Yeargan in Chicago, and there were two significant cast changes, with Steven Pasquale giving way to Wayne Wilcox as Fabrizio, and Robert Shampain replaced by Andrew Rothenberg in the role of Roy Johnson.

The musical tells a story similar to that of Spencer's novel and the fine 1962 MGM film version that starred Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux, and George Hamilton. A well-to-do American wife, Margaret Johnson Victoria Clark from North Carolina, is traveling in Italy with her twenty-six-year-old daughter, Clara Celia Keenan-Bolger, in the summer of 1953. Remaining back home is Margaret's husband, Roy, an executive with a tobacco company.

In Florence, Clara meets a handsome, impetuous young Florentine named Fabrizio, along with Fabrizio's family, which includes his parents Mark Harelik and Patti Cohenour, his brother Guiseppe Glenn Seven Allen, and Guiseppe's wife, Franca Kelli O'Hara, currently in Dracula. Because of Clara's emotionally arrested state, a condition that Margaret keeps secret from the Italians, Margaret attempts to break up the relationship between the young pair. But as the story develops, the overprotective mother learns to adjust and let go of her daughter so that the child can find the happiness the mother has not found in her own marriage.

The cast's four couples are accompanied by an onstage quintet of piano, violin, cello, harp, and acoustic bass, as well as by an ensemble of four incidental performers. The musical director is Ted Sperling, who shares the orchestrations with Guettel.

There have been critical raves for the gifted Victoria Clark, who plays Margaret, and to whom Lucas has given passages of direct audience address. Critics have described the show as a chamber opera, but it seems to possess a stronger storyline than Floyd Collins, and could thus have wider appeal.

Reviews have been somewhat guarded, however. In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Joe Adcock described the show as "finely wrought, elegant, radiant and studded with gems....It is valuable as art. But its stature as a life-enhancing, life-illuminating creation with universal appeal is slight." Reviewing the Chicago incarnation, Michael Phillips in the Tribune felt that the show "remains a step or two away from satisfying completion....a chamber musical of high polish and a slight sense of detachment. And for all its modernist lushness, Guettel's score holds out on us." Hedy Weiss, of the same city's Sun-Times, felt the show is "delicate, lyrical but somewhat uneven," and Variety's Chris Jones called it "Broadway-worthy, capable of attracting both an enthusiastic audience and boffo reviews....But despite a trio of fine performances, Bartlett Sher's production is significantly flawed. It seems afraid to become the only thing it can and should be: a serious, atmospheric show with weighty themes."

Several outside observers have also weighed in. Richard Ouzounian in the Toronto Star called the show "almost totally unmoving....the lyrics say little, the music seldom resolves into a melody." But there have also been raves in high places. In The New Yorker, where the show's source material originated, John Lahr concluded by saying "I suspect that the swamis of the rialto will pass on bringing it to Broadway." This proved incorrect, although it is going to Broadway in a not-for-profit situation, rather than in a commercial production. Lahr continued, "Guettel's kind of talent cannot be denied. He shouldn't change for Broadway; Broadway, if it is to survive as a creative theatrical force, should change for him."

In a profile of Guettel that ran in The New York Times' Sunday magazine, Jesse Green called The Light in the Piazza "a ravishing work....could be a classic....half a dozen of the most convincing and beautiful new theater songs I've heard in a long time."

Lincoln Center Theater's lightweight The Frogs is something of a break from the company's string of somber and mostly unsuccessful musicals that has included Marie Christine, Parade, Thou Shalt Not, and A Man of No Importance. It remains to be seen whether or not The Light in the Piazza will find a wide audience or qualify as another serious, arty piece for a limited few. It may be worth noting that Lahr also championed Caroline, or Change, last season's art-house musical whose Broadway transfer was a commercial failure. Still, The Light in the Piazza concerns the various aspects of love. Perhaps it will be able to strike an emotional chord that those other serious titles weren't quite able to sound. Given this season's line-up, it's not difficult to imagine Light in the Piazza as a strong contender in the 2005 Best Musical Tony category.

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