There's a song at the beginning of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau's offbeat and haunting Appalachian musical, "Floyd Collins," that tells its audience the following: Listen to the tale of a man who got lost, a hundred feet under the winter frost.
Two more theater companies have firmed up their 2011-12 seasons, which will kick off in spectacular fashion during this year's Curtain Up! event, scheduled for Sept. 16. The American Repertory Theatre of Western New York, the small but vibrant company launched by local playwright and director Matthew LaChiusa in 2008, will open its season Sept. 16 with its first musical, Adam Guettel's "Floyd Collins." That show runs through Oct. 1.
That said, director Kristen Bures' eight-person cast performs the difficult material with astonishing ease. James Blanchard and Sarah DeGray have beautiful chemistry as [Fabrizio] and Clara. (DeGray and Victoria Drew play Clara on alternate nights.) Blanchard evokes winsome charm; DeGray, lovestruck innocence. Blanchard's honeyed tenor tackles [Adam Guettel]'s tricky tunes effortlessly, and blends well with DeGray's clear soprano. All four supporting Naccarellis and swing performer Mike Ravey (who fills three roles) play their characters with zest. Ravey especially stands out for his portrait of [Margaret]'s emotionally detached husband, Roy, who talks coldly to her on the phone from North Carolina. Marc Yakubosky makes a debonair, confident Papa [Naccarelli], while Joseph O. Grabon's G...
Marichelle Roque-Lutz A musical is an opera is a musical when OperaLancaster opens its season Friday with Adam Guettel's "The Light in the Piazza" at Franklin & Marshall's Roschel Performing Arts Center.
It's a good thing for Broadway she didn't base her decision on first impressions. If she had, composer Adam Guettel wouldn't necessarily have gotten the green light. "He seemed very eager about it, and he was a very attractive young man," she recalled of their first meeting, when we spoke last week. "But he looked much younger than he was, and I thought, 'He's too young to do all that.' Isn't that wonderful?" [Elizabeth Spencer] asked. "Because that's in the book, too. Though we're really worlds different from each other, he got it. That's the amazing thing. The music is just soaring; it just catches you up right away. It's almost miraculous." "I just forgot about it," Spencer said. Somewhere in the subsequent years, Guettel was looking for inspiration for a new musical work. His moth...
The Light in the Piazza" is a museum-quality musical, possessing a subdued and sophisticated beauty and the kind of delectable languor that steals over you when you get lost in a painting or another work of art. Composer Adam Guettel, the grandson of Broadway great Richard Rodgers, does not conform to standard musical formula with this chamber work, adapted by Craig Lucas from Elizabeth Spencer's 1954 novella about an ultraprotective Southern matron touring Italy with her beautiful young daughter.
There are two songs in "The Light in the Piazza," a musical based on a bittersweet 1959 novella about an American mother and daughter traveling in Italy, that are startling in their retro lyricism. The title song and another ballad, "Love to Me," have a soaring melodic intensity that evokes Broadway musicals of an earlier era. It's unfair to the talented and distinctive songwriter, Adam Guettel, to note that his grandfather was Richard Rodgers, but the songs' rich melodies do evoke Rodgers, the most sweepingly romantic of all theater composers.
Reimagined by composer/lyricist Adam Guettel and librettist Craig Lucas from a novella by Elizabeth Spencer, the story focuses on Margaret's (the marvelous Sherri L. Edelen) trip to Florence with her daughter Clara (Whitney Bashor). The vacation recreates Margaret's honeymoon with her hubby Roy (Joe Guzman), but it's Clara who finds love in what she calls "the land of naked marble boys. As a romance, the musical is certainly about love, but mostly it's about the risk of chasing your dream. "Risk is everything," sings [Fabrizio]'s mother Signora (Maureen Torsney-Weir). Of course, risk doesn't always bring rewards. "No one with a dream should come to Italy," says Margaret. An intoxicating place of impossible beauty (captured magnificently in R. Lee Kennedy's atmospheric lighting design) ...
When Margaret Johnson and her daughter Clara arrive in Florence, the journey has only begun, says actress Christine Andreas. Andreas plays Johnson, a middle-aged woman from Winston-Salem, N.C., in the national touring production of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' musical "The Light in the Piazza.
AUDRA MCDONALD Build a Bridge (Nonesuch) Audra McDonald is more than a brilliant performer and a masterful vocalist. For many contemporary song composers, she's the ideal muse and a touchingly direct interpreter of the human heart. She can weave lyric and sound into a chain of sorrow or celebration -- but then she can dissolve its links with a breath so it sighs away into memory. Her skills are as applicable to opera as popular song, at least for some repertoire: her string of recent performances for Houston Grand Opera of Poulenc's monodrama La voix humaine and Michael John LaChiusa's solo opera Send (who are you? I love you) was, by all accounts, a special blend of theater and music. What I like about McDonald is her range. She can be profound or stylized. She can project a cool, day-...
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