The Light in the Piazza

The reputation that Piazza has accrued since its development days at the Intiman and Goodman and its 2005 Broadway success is of a charmingly peculiar musical oddity. As indicated by Sher’s touring production, that impression may stem partly from there being two musicals here, two ill-fitting halves of an odd-couple union. One belongs to book writer Lucas. In his pedestrian adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel, boy gets, loses, gets, loses, gets girl in the spin cycle of conventional romance. In 1953, an American mom, Margaret (Andreas), and her childlike adult daughter, Clara (Clarke), travel to Italy, where Clara and native Fabrizio (Burnham) lock hearts. Margaret must decide whether to let her touched kid (a hoof to the head in childhood—pretty silly, really) get married and set off into her own life.

The other musical comes from composer and lyricist Guettel, who’s after something much more ephemeral and ambitious. His intricate songs, more interesting than engaging, want to capture through Margaret and Clara the feeling of being elsewhere (outside of one’s home and one’s self) and the attendant, fleeting sense of dreamy hope and possibility. Where Lucas writes of a peopled piazza, Guettel glimpses its transitory light.

A carefully calibrated production could spackle the gap. But the intimate, precise Piazza is adrift in the yawning Auditorium Theatre and washed out by a mannered, fluttery-Southerner turn from Andreas, whose difficulty sustaining her notes disappoints. In an otherwise all-right cast, Burnham’s turbo lungs and beaming energy give the sung-in-Italian scenes operatic breadth.—Novid Parsi