The Light in the Piazza at South Coast Rep — Page 2

Matthew Morrison was only in Piazza for about 5.5 months, so about 200 performances. If he missed 60, that's pretty bad. I wonder if he missed a lot in South Pacific, too.

What did David Burnham say about why he left NYC and went back to the farm?

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You know how you can put a piece of chocolate in your mouth and not chew at all and just let it melt and your mouth absorbs it slowly and you enjoy the subtleties of the taste so much more deeply than if you just chewed it and wolfed it down? Yeah, that's what this production was like.

I only had two complaints. One is quite small and one is quite large.

The small one? While the costumes were absolutely gorgeous, I thought the design choice of having Clara and Margaret matching outfits the entire time to be very heavy handed. Communicating their parallel journeys through their clothes is a wonderful thought but it could have been done with much more subtlety.

The large one is one that, unfortunately, has limited almost every large musical I've seen in the past few years: the sound design. It was just awful. We've got these incredible voices in an intimate theatre and there was no life to the sound. It was all over mixed, resulting in a flat, dead sound. This music and those voices should wash over you but instead it just hits you like a wall. They might as well have been singing to tracks and lip synching for all the life the sound design brought to the production.

Aside from these two complaints, it was a perfect evening in the theatre. I even gave it a standing O!