I first fell in love with Light in the Piazza when I saw a recording of the PBS broadcast over a decade ago. It's been years since I've seen a production, so I was rather excited for this, especially considering Chris Jones's stamp of approval. I wish I shared in his admiration for this production.
Solea was out tonight (in the most bizarre understudy announcement I've ever seen, a man walked onstage with a handheld microphone and said that Ms. Pfeiffer "is indisposed and is unable to perform"
. Her understudy was fine but nobody in this production has any real fire or passion. The whole thing was cool to the touch. Clara seemed generally capable of handling herself despite minor freakout, Fabrizio seemed generally interested in Clara but not head-over-heels in love, and Margaret seemed generally concerned about her daughter but not shaken to the core by anything. Renee Fleming's acting has none of the woodenness of false "I'm really a singer first" quality her performance in Carousel did, and she does sound lovely and I could understand every word, I'll give her that, and she is probably the strongest part of the cast, but the whole thing kind of fell flat. I don't know if Solea's performance would have brightened things up (her understudy had a nasally placement and a wobbly vibrato that really grated on me), but the problems were deeper than any one person.
Daniel Evans's production just didn't feel very well staged. The blocking very "let's cross to the other side of the stage since we've been standing still for a little while" instead of being motivated by the text. The unit set looks pretty when you walk into the theatre but it doesn't really serve the piece. For a musical with multiple songs about walking, the set didn't really give them many places to go walking or for people to enter/exit from. There's a platform that's horizontally raked, on which all of the indoor scenes take place, so whenever we're in the Nacarelli home everyone slants to the left a little bit. And there were a few theatrical "tricks" that didn't do much for me--rather than the hat being swept away, actors sitting on stairs above Clara carry it away and pass it off to each other (my companion who'd never seen the show asked why others stole her hat), and during The Beauty Is, actors recreated paintings in the background, adding nothing to the story and upstaging Clara's performance of the song. And I couldn't stop wondering why there was a donut-shaped piece of sky suspended from the flies the whole evening (Evans of course directs Fleming to look at it when she sings of "a painted ceiling" in the final song--which earned a chuckle from me).
I have a lot of minor, nitpicky gripes I could list off, but really, I could forgive most of them if the production had more semblance of heart. I didn't buy that anyone was falling in love in this show, I didn't buy that Clara and Fabrizio's love for each other inspired Margaret to realize the problems in her own marriage, I didn't buy that Clara's happiness was so overwhelming that Margaret had to give her a chance and let her go, I didn't buy that Clara's problems would be anything that her new family couldn't handle. There was an alarming lack of conflict. This production just doesn't "get" what makes the show tick, and so this musical I love so much ended up kind of boring me.
