The Light in the Piazza

In his liner notes, former theater critic Frank Rich draws an obvious parallel between The Light in the Piazza, the first Broadway musical with songs by Adam Guettel which opened in 2005, and Do I Hear a Waltz?, the 1965 musical with songs by Guettel's grandfather, Richard Rodgers, and Stephen Sondheim. Do I Hear a Waltz? was about a matronly woman who finds love while on vacation in Italy; The Light in the Piazza is about a brain-damaged young woman who does the same thing. But just as Guettel is both the son and grandson of Broadway composers (his mother, Mary Rodgers, is best known for Once upon a Mattress), he is as much the spiritual descendant of Sondheim, a more cerebral, complex writer, just as Sondheim was of Richard Rodgers' old partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. The Light in the Piazza cannot be called a musical comedy. There are precious few laughs witnessing the torn feelings of Margaret Johnson (Victoria Clark), mother of Clara (Kelli O'Hara), who knows that her daughter is not mentally competent to fulfill her love for her new Italian fiancé Fabrizio Naccarelli (Matthew Morrison). But the serious subject matter has freed Guettel from any obligation he might have felt to write a traditional Broadway score. Instead, the music is a series of art songs and tone poems, some of them very beautiful. In particular, "Il Mondo Era Vuoto" (this is a show in which the Italian characters tend to speak and sing in Italian) finds Fabrizio expressing his love far more eloquently than he can manage in his broken English, and the show-closing "Fable," in which Margaret acquiesces to Clara's marriage only by doubting the authenticity of all love, are quite striking. At a time when the Broadway musical theater is dominated by broadly satirical comedies like The Producers and Monty Python's Spamalot, there has also been a less visible movement toward much more seriously intended fare, major examples being Caroline, or Change from 2004 and this show. Such works may not cause the stampede at the box office that their cartoonish competitors do, but they may have more to do with the future of the musical theater. The Light in the Piazza marks an overdue Broadway debut for a major composer, and it is a suitably uncompromising work. (The Light in the Piazza won the 2005 Tony Award for original score.) ~ William Ruhlmann