Miami's performing arts center opened unofficially in September with The Light in the Piazza, winner of six Tony Awards in 2005. Official gala events for the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts -- named for cruise operator Carnival Corp., which paid $20 million for the rights and is headquartered nearby -- didn't begin until Oct. 5, 2006. On the fourth stop of its first national tour, the Craig Lucas-Adam Guettel romantic musical was in fine form at the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the new venue that will mount touring Broadway shows.
There's good news for audiences long bedeviled by the patchy, popping, hissing sound system that could plague productions at the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach: The sound at the Ziff gets good marks.So does the musical, which stems from a 1960 short story that was made into a 1962 movie starring Olivia de Havilland as the mother, Yvette Mimieux as the daughter, George Hamilton as the boyfriend and Rossano Brazzi as his father. The music (demanding but nevertheless melodic) and lyrics (that all but disappear when words fail the characters) is by Guettel, best known before his Piazza Tony win for Floyd Collins in 1996 and for being the grandson of Richard Rodgers -- and, yes, you'll hear a waltz. This seems right.
With a book by Craig Lucas (of Prelude to a Kiss fame), The Light in the Piazza isn't so much a love-conquers-all story as a riff on characters caught between past and future, "tomorrow and yesterday." "It's a new old world," we're told early on when the mother and daughter from North Carolina arrive in Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance, on vacation.The year is 1953. Margaret Johnson and her husband had vacationed there before the war; now she's back with their adult, but mentally and emotionally impaired, daughter, Clara.
Amid the statuary of "naked marble boys" enters Fabrizio, a 20-year-old Florentine immediately smitten by Clara. Theirs is a struggle to communicate, to know and be known (think Brian Friel's Translations with orchestral strings). Guettel gives them a poignant pair of songs: "Say it Somehow," initiated by Elena Shaddow as Clara, and "Love to Me," a heartbreaker delivered by David Burnham in one of his many splendid moments as Fabrizio. Margaret's dilemma -- a protective mother with an uncommunicative husband back home and an English-speaking father-of-the-boyfriend in Italy -- manages to surprise. Christine Andreas, herself the mother of a grown mentally impaired child, renders Margaret without undue sentimentality, even as the award-winning orchestrations for her songs insert a touch of woodwinds into a score dominated by strings and piano.
This is a funnier work than it may seem in synopsis. Fabrizio's early aria in Italian is greeted by teasing by his brother (played by Jonathan Hammond), who's quite the dancer, as well. Sets, lighting and costumes hit the right notes, and the actors do right by the music and the demands of regional accents.
