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| Emily Skinner in The Huntington Theatre's The Light in the Piazza. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.) |
The new Huntington Theatre mounting of The Light in the Piazza is the fourth production I’ve seen of this show, and except for Bartlett Sher’s spectacular original staging, at Lincoln Center in 2005, it’s the best. I think that Piazza, with its first-rate Craig Lucas book derived from Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel and its soaring impressionistic score by Adam Guettel, is the greatest musical written in the twenty-first century. (Yes, I love Hamilton.) It’s an unconventional romantic musical in which the leap of faith made by the wife of a North Carolina tobacco executive named Margaret Johnson, who brings her daughter Clara to Florence on vacation in 1953, is a symbol for all of our attempts to find happiness in love, even though we know that the effort is reckless because as often as not it ends in shambles. One of the elements that make the play unusual is that though the lovers are Clara and a young Florentine named Fabrizio Naccarelli, the son of a shopkeeper, who fall in love at first sight. Margaret is the protagonist, and it’s finally she who has to overcome personal obstacles, not her daughter. She has been Clara’s protector since, at twelve, the girl was kicked in the head by a pony, apparently halting her emotional development. So when she and Fabrizio become entranced with each other, Margaret – encouraged via long distance by her husband Roy back home in Winston-Salem – attempts to stop it before the humiliating moment when the Naccarellis figure out something is wrong. But no one in the Naccarelli family is put off by Clara’s childlike nature, or even by her explosion when Fabrizio’s flirtatious sister-in-law, Franca, gets too close to him at a family get-together. The Naccarellis find her refreshingly old-fashioned; even Franca, whose attention-getting behavior is a response to her husband’s sexual duplicitousness, defends her; she thinks that Clara is right to fight for her man she loves and even wishes she had done so. Margaret has to confront the fact that the greater block to her approving Clara’s union with Fabrizio is the fact that her own marriage has been a disappointment, that she long ago ceased to believe in love.
Margaret is one of the most brilliantly conceived female characters in the history of musicals, but Clara too is a remarkable creation with her own distinctive complexity. She’s like the heroine in a Dickens novel (here I’m thinking of Florence Dombey in Dombey and Son) or a D.W. Griffith melodrama (and now I’m recalling Mae Marsh as The Dear One in the modern segment of Intolerance) whose qualities turn out to be not simplistic at all but so drenched in profound feeling that they transcend the form of the narrative. It turns out that whatever Clara’s limitations are, they aren’t an inability to develop emotionally. As her ballads “The Beauty Is” and “The Light in the Piazza” reveal, she has a kind of emotional perceptiveness that illuminates the workings of the human heart. She intuits that her father doesn’t love her mother – a truth she throws at Margaret in a moment of anger – even though Roy himself doesn’t recognize his own emotional paralysis. And Clara, of course, isn’t blinded by her mother’s cynicism or her guilt at her inability to save her daughter from the pony’s kick. In the musical the light in the piazza is a symbol not just for romance, dazzling and sweet and overpowering, but for Clara’s understanding of what it means. “I know what the sunlight can be,” she sings.
It’s rushing up
It’s pouring out
It’s flying through the air . . .
All I see is
All I want is tearing from inside
I see it
Now I see it everywhere
It’s everywhere
It’s everything and everywhere
Fabrizio . . .
Emily Skinner, who plays Margaret in the Huntington production, is following in daunting footsteps – not just those of Victoria Clark, who created the role and was unforgettable in it, but also of the divine Renée Fleming, who acted and sang it at the Southbank Centre in London in 2019. And Skinner, a veteran musical-theatre performer who has often played parts that don’t permit her to draw fully on her rare combination of high-comic sophistication and romantic sensitivity (like her turn as the music teacher in last season’s New York, New York on Broadway), rises to the challenge. I was a tad put off in the early scenes by her sassiness and ironic knowingness, but as soon as she gets into Margaret’s first great solo, “Dividing Day,” about her instinctive sense that Roy put himself at a mysterious remove from her on their wedding day, Skinner moves unerringly to the center of the character. To play Margaret requires both reflective and emotional intelligence, and Skinner has both. We comprehend that it’s Margaret’s own bitter experience of marriage and fear for her daughter that are getting in her way; her triumph is that she’s able to force her way through them in the end, to celebrate Clara’s discovery of love rather than try to pull her away from it. That’s what “Fable,” the show’s great eleven-o’clock number, is about, and Skinner’s reading of it is beautiful. By that time we’ve already heard her on the reprise of “The Beauty Is” and her marvelous duet, “Let’s Walk,” with Fabrizio’s father, in which Margaret rescues the wedding from an unexpected disturbance. (At the end of this scene, Loretta Greco’s staging and the emotional shadings Skinner gives to it alter the meaning significantly from Sher’s and Clark’s in the original. That’s not a criticism, just an observation.) Skinner’s superb technique in these musical highlights is so completely in sync with the depth of her acting that they seem indistinguishable.
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| Joshua Grosso and Sarah-Anne Martinez. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes.) |
Sarah-Anne Martinez takes a more emphatic approach to the character’s fragility than the other Claras I’ve liked, like Dove Cameron in the London version, but she’s very good. You can’t help comparing her to Kelli O’Hara in the original production, because it’s not likely that anyone will ever be able to bring to the part that mix of purity and intensity. O’Hara is one of a kind: every time I’ve heard her put her own stamp on a great ballad, whether it’s Gershwin’s “But Not for Me” in Nice Work If You Can Get It or Porter’s “So in Love” in Kiss Me, Kate or Styne and Comden and Green’s “The Party’s Over” in Bells Are Ringing, I’ve thought, Well, I’m never going to hear a better rendition of that song. But the comparison is unfair – that Martinez isn’t O’Hara isn’t her fault, and on the title song she has a translucent clarity. The role of Fabrizio seems to bring out the best in everyone who tries it: Matthew Morrison on Broadway, Jeff Irving at the Shaw Festival in 2013, Rob Houchen in London, and now a gifted unknown named Joshua Grosso, who is inexpressibly affecting, both in his romantic fumbling and in his bout of despair when he thinks his ardor has ruined everything. The treatment of the Clara-Fabrizio romance in The Light in the Piazza charts the path to love as charmingly and touchingly in its way as Shakespeare’s comedies and the comic sections of Romeo and Juliet. Here Fabrizio fumbles because it’s the first time he’s fallen in love plus he doesn’t have the language to express to Clara how he feels about her. (But he doesn’t need to; she gets it, she shares it.) Eventually he finds his way: he learns how to think about what he feels and even masters enough English to present it to her. That’s the journey Guettel takes us along in “Il Mondo Era Vuoto” and then “Passegiata” and “Say It Somehow” and finally, thrillingly, “Love to Me,” the show’s penultimate number.
William Michals is a fine Signor Naccarelli, and Rebekah Rae Robles does more with the part of Franca that anyone else has in my experience. It’s the first time I’ve been moved by the character’s distress in her solo, “Hysteria.” The production is lovely to look at. Greco’s staging is a little symmetrical for my taste, but she produces some painterly images and her sense of the dramatic structure of the piece and of the relationships is unerring. The Huntington has always shown a strong hand with musicals, since the first one I saw there, Pal Joey, back in 1992 (with Donna Murphy as Vera). This production is wonderful to look at, thanks to the scenic (Andrew Boyce), costume (Alex Jaeger), lighting (Christipher Akerlind) and projection (Yuki Izumihara) designers and Daniel Pelzig’s subtle choreography, and wonderful to listen to, thanks to Andrea Grody’s musical direction and the voices in the cast. I was won over in the opening number, “Statues and Stories,” where the company fills up the stage and you realize that the story we’re going to get isn’t the historical pastiche Margaret is relating to her daughter about Florence but the chronicle of Clara’s falling in love and achieving, as Margaret puts it in “Let’s Walk,” the road to happiness. It’s a lush beginning, with the singers rendering Adam Guettel’s indelible music lovingly. And the ending, where Emily Skinner’s Margaret conveys at last a hope for her Clara – “Love, if you can, oh my Clara, / Love if you can and be loved . . . / May it last forever” – makes good on the promise of that opening.
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| Taylor Trensch and the company of Floyd Collins. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) |
My introduction to Guettel’s work, like many people’s, was Floyd Collins, his 1996 musical which relates the true story of the young Kentucky spelunker whose dream of making his fortune by finding a cave he could open to the public was transformed into a nightmare when he got stuck in one. Collins’s entrapment in Sand Cave, occurring in 1925, was one of the first disasters to be covered on the radio as well as in the newspapers, and the property under which his life ebbed away over the course of fourteen days became the scene of a media circus. If you don’t know the show but you recognize the story, you may have caught Billy Wilder’s 1951 Ace in the Hole on TCM, which was inspired by the Collins story. Wilder’s film is intended to be a satire but its main character, played by Kirk Douglas, is a heartless reporter who uses the poor doomed bastard as a ticket to fame, and Wilder, like his anti-hero, parades his cynicism with all the heartless fervor of a snake oil salesman. It’s a loathsome movie. By contrast Floyd Collins, which has a book by Tina Landau (who also supplied additional lyrics), has humanity and soul. It’s a tragedy that honors Floyd the dreamer. The reporter figure, Skeets Miller, who is the secondary lead, is a Louisville scribbler initially drawn to Mammoth Cave National Park by the color and excitement of the case, but after he climbs down and views Floyd’s situation he becomes an impassioned advocate for his rescue and even a participant in the fruitless efforts to free him.Floyd Collins played a short run off-Broadway under the auspices of Playwrights Horizons and has been revived all over. (I saw it at the Shaw Festival in 2004, in a tense, dynamic production directed by Eda Holmes.) Its most memorable song, the heartbreaking, elegiac finale “How Glory Goes,” became famous when Audra McDonald made it the title track of a 2000 album. But only now has it opened on Broadway, where Landau, who directed it nearly three decades ago, has restaged it magnificently at Lincoln Center.
If you come to this musical from a familiarity with The Light in the Piazza you’re liable to be surprised. Guettel’s music is beautiful and some of the songs are wildly imaginative, like “Lucky” (sung by Floyd’s sister Nellie, played by Lizzy McAlpine)) and “The Riddle Song,” the duet between Floyd (Jeremy Jordan) and his brother Homer (Jason Gotay) that ends act one, wherein Homer engages Floyd in a game from their childhood to keep up his spirits and occupy his mind. But the score of Piazza comes unmistakably from the realm of the American musical; you can hear Guettel’s legendary grandfather, Richard Rodgers, in the melodic invention. The music in Floyd Collins channels folk, blues, bluegrass and jazz into a modernist opera style. Specifically it has the rough-hewn feel of an American opera like Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath or of Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, which isn’t actually an opera but that’s how you remember it afterwards. “How Glory Goes” is the only song that sounds like a musical number. And like those works by Gordon and Brown, Floyd Collins is a distinctly American tragedy. What links it to The Light in the Piazza is the offbeat poetry in the lyrics, which sometimes sounds awkward at first but then lingers in your brain – and stays miraculously fresh, like Margaret’s “But I have had dividing day” and the moment in Floyd Collins when Miss Jane (Jessica Molaskey), Floyd’s stepmother, tells her husband Lee (Marc Kudisch) that he and she are “a lullaby to each other.” (This is a line that shows up in the dialogue before Miss Jane weaves it into their duet, “Heart and Hand.”)
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| Jeremy Jordan as Floyd. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) |
Guettel and Landau love the characters, and the actors fall into them with the kind of collective bliss you can intuit in a show with a large ensemble that is given both the material and the directorial freedom to really sculpt their characters. In this way the musical is reminiscent of Girl from the North Country, written and directed by Conor McPherson (and which also had a large and variegated cast of characters). Jordan bursts onstage at the beginning with what feels like adolescent bravado, like a high school football player; he seems so young that I was startled to learn that Floyd was thirty-seven when he died – and more amazed to discover that Jordan himself is forty. So it’s an acting choice, and a smart one: heading toward a middle age he’ll never reach, Floyd is still unsettled, still a dreamer who believes he can keep riding his luck. (His kid sister Nellie, who adores him, is a will-o’-the-wisp of a girl who holds onto her faith in that luck as long as she can.) I didn’t see Christopher Innvar, who created the part and sounds great on the original cast album, but Jordan is deeply moving. He has to spend almost the entire play on his back (though he’s elevated), but his energy is athletic, which underscores the awfulness of his predicament. Only in a few scenes is Jordan allowed to get up and move around – we understand we’re seeing what’s in his head, where his body can roam along with his spirit – and every time it’s an emotional cataclysm. The first is in “The Riddle Song,” which marks the second time Jordan and Gotay get to sing together. Guettel wrote the harmonies in these duets to convey the fiercely loving but complicated relationship of two brothers in a Southern country family that is struggling financially; the two actors come to life in a special way in both these numbers but especially in “The Riddle Song,” which would have to be one of the high points of any production of Floyd Collins. Among the supporting men in this revival, Taylor Trensch got the Tony nomination for playing Skeets, and he’s splendid. But I’d like to think Gotay wasn’t far behind in the voting.
After Floyd, Skeets is the showcase role, partly because he tells the story and partly because his motivation changes dramatically in the course of it. The writers are wise not to shove the gruesomeness of the narrative in our faces, varying both the focus and the tone, but it’s generally Skeets who reinvigorates its horror, most potently in the scene where he emerges from the cave and details what he saw and mostly felt in the dark underground. (I retain a sharp memory of the first time I saw this scene, played by Jeff Lillico in the Shaw production.) Trensch has a nerdy sweetness in the role, and he shows you how Miller grows up in the course of these agonizing two weeks, as well as how his love for Floyd grows. He becomes almost as close to Collins as Homer and Nellie. Kudisch (who also had a major role in Girl from the North Country) and Molaskey collaborate poignantly as the elder members of the Collins family. The other standout in the cast is Sean Allan Krill as H.T. Carmichael, the owner of the Kentucky Rock Asphalt Company, who takes over the rescue operation. Carmichael is stentorian and his confidence that only he has the skill and experience to decide how it should go makes him seem, for a long time, dictatorial and self-promoting. But Landau and Guettel are too generous to caricature him or make him into a villain; it becomes increasingly clear in the second act, as the prospect of getting Floyd out becomes dimmer and dimmer, that Carmichael’s ferocity is an expression less of ego than of his desperation to save the man’s life.
When I saw the show at the Shaw Festival twenty years ago the only part I didn’t care for was the depiction of the chorus of vulture-like reporters (excluding Skeets Miller) at the top of act two (the “Is That Remarkable” number), which was trite, and the only time in the show when I was reminded of Ace in the Hole. But Landau renders it as an expressionist fantasy countered by the next number, “The Carnival,” which is Floyd’s dream of the opening of Sand Cave to the public, a beautifully designed interlude that comes to an abrupt end when Lee’s voice filters into his son’s reverie and tells him, “No, son, you’re still trapped.” Honestly, there isn’t a scene in this production that doesn’t work, and hardly any of the portrayals falls short. Cole Vaughan is too showy as the guitar-strumming teen among the group of young men who hang out at the cave and act as a sort of chorus; he’s the only actor on stage who isn’t aiming for realism. And McAlpine’s acting is rather bland except during her songs, “Lucky” in the first act and “Through the Mountain” in the second. Those musical performances, however, redeem her.
Landau’s staging is staggeringly good, I think; the stage pictures are exquisite. (She begins the second act by quoting one of the classic stage images in the history of American theatre, from the graveyard scene in Our Town.) The set design by dots and Scott Zielinski’s lighting complete her vision. At the outset the stage is bare, but when Floyd climbs and slides down into Sand Cave protuberances push up into the half-light like strange plants. Most of the set changes occur in partial darkness. It’s hard to think of a show I’ve seen that makes such grand use of underlighting; when Skeets introduces himself to Homer, the two men are silhouetted by pools of black. Top to bottom, this is the revival that Floyd Collins deserves.
– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
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