The ANNOTICO Report
New York Post
By Clive Barnes
April 19, 2005
AMERICANS in Italy, in the summer of 1953: A mother and
daughter, guidebook
in hand, are in the Piazza Signoria in Florence. The
wind catches the
girl's hat, and a young Italian man retrieves it.
That's the starting impulse of "The Light in the Piazza,"
the
interesting...musical that Lincoln Center Theatre opened
last night at the
Vivian Beaumont.
The story is taken from Elizabeth Spencer's 1959 novella,
and the resulting
musical, which has a book by Craig Lucas and music and
lyrics by Adam
Guettel, is a sweet oddity.
The young woman is Clara Johnson (Kelli O'Hara), and though
she is 26 years
old, she seems peculiarly immature, so her mother, Margaret
(Victoria
Clark), is perhaps understandably protective.
Fabrizio (Matthew Morrison), the madly smitten Florentine,
is only 20, but
soon the lovers are planning marriage. Yet there is a
serious snag — and it
puts Margaret in a difficult position with Fabrizio and
his family:
When Clara was 10, she was kicked in the head by a pony.
Now, as a doctor
tells her mother, she has "a 10-year-old mind in a 26-year-old
body."
Lucas ("Prelude to a Kiss") has carefully wrought the
musical's fascinating
book, which is full of character and atmosphere.
Assisted by Michael Yeargan's clever and versatile settings,
Catherine
Zuber's spot-on period costuming, Christopher Akerlind's
consistently apt
lighting and Bartlett Sher's effortless staging, the
playwright perfectly
captures the shadow and substance of postwar Italy.
(The composer)... Guettel is Broadway royalty — his grandfather
was Richard
Rodgers, and his mother, Mary Rodgers, wrote the music
for "Once Upon a
Mattress." He himself, with the much admired off-Broadway
"Floyd Collins"
to his credit, is clearly positioned as "post-Sondheim,"
with all the
difficulties that implies.
His lyrics are fluent and touching, full of the love of
living and the joys
and pains of life....the music (is not of as high a)
melodic quality, the
kind that can catch in the mind and heart — the same
quality that made his
grandfather, and Sondheim, great.
The performances are uniformly fine. Clark, in the leading
role as the
mother, gives a beautifully layered performance, often
funny yet touching.
As the impetuous lovers, a luminous O'Hara and a headstrong
Morrison are
faultless, and Fabrizio's bourgeois family — led by a
superbly starchy Mark
Harelik as the father — are wonderfully convincing....
THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA
At the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Lincoln Center; (212)
239-6200.