Review of THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA by Theatre Cedar Rapids

 

The Light in the Piazza, Theatre Cedar Rapids Brucemore offering for 2024 takes a noble crack at a clearly Sondheim inspired musical. It doesn’t match Sondheim in music or plot, but falling a bit short of genius is still pretty damn good. Piazza debuted in 2003 and was based on an earlier book. It has gone through further tummy tucks for later successful New York and London runs. In London, the role of Margaret was played by semi-retired opera diva Rene Flemming.

This leads me to remind readers that you have to work a bit harder to appreciate many of today’s musicals. Hummable tunes and chorus casts large enough to fill a small hall have been left in the dust. In this rendering the four-member chorus is relegated to a few ballet moves and posing like statues in the stage set’s niches. Even with the splash limited to lush lighting and more limited tete a tetes, that isn’t the biggest problem with The Light in the Piazza. For me, it was that it is almost half-spoken or sung in Italian and there are no operatic sub-titles to help an audience over this linguistic hump. I admire the time that the acting company must have devoted to mastering both real Italian and the accents of non-native people attempting to speak English or Italian. Yet, I must admit to losing where the story was going on occasion.  It didn’t kill the piece for me, but I would have been helped by some better translation.

What I did get was that sometime in the 1950’s a well-off southern mother (Margaret), who has some long standing marital problems herself, brings her daughter (Clara) to Florence for a vacation. A wayward wind blows Clara’s hat right into the hands of a young Italian (Fabrizo) and bingo “attraction at first sight.” Clara is bowled over and mother Margaret goes into protective mode.  It is then revealed that Clara has been kicked by a horse at a young age and is now physically a woman but is lacking in normal mental and emotional development. Margaret is afraid if Clara is allowed to fall in love, she will be jilted as soon as the young man or his family discovers her disability. I think you can imagine the rest of the story without any help from me.      

Don’t get me wrong. This is still a production well worth seeing. The performance takes place outdoors in a natural amphitheater. The set, composed of beautiful Renaissance arches and stairs, takes on with lighting  gorgeous shades of golden Florentine sunshine as well as moody violet-tinted evening hours. A neat little working fountain held the left side of the stage and had a tiny copy of Michaelangelo’s David at its center. This supplies a somewhat ironic comment on the lover's developing relationship. In other words, the stage design was perfecto.  

Although the young lovers are important, the glue that holds the piece together is the mother (Margaret), played by Rebecca Fields Moffitt. She takes over the part with authority and along the way  is both physically and vocally more convincing than the young lovers. She manages to fold her own unhappy marriage into her desire to protect her daughter while recognizing and playing the comic moments nicely.

The bittersweet semi-operatic score is ideal for this dark romance, although it would help if Catharine Blades (Clara) could find a way to indicating her affliction in manner as well as in song. She has a lovely voice, but seems so perfectly normal that if we had not been told we might not think she has the problem her mother says she has. Fabrizio, played by Tegas Gururaja, also manages the difficult vocals well and does display the physical tentativeness of a young Italian who is not quite the typical smooth Italian Roue often depicted in films. Max Moreno, (Signor Naccarelli), Fabrizo’s very Italian haberdasher father, was solid right down the line.  Fabrizio’s older brother had some potential comic contrasts to his more sedate younger brother that were never quite realized. Perhaps, he was not given enough latitude by the director to exploit this contrast and thereby lightening the mood a bit more often. 

Audience reaction at the performance we saw was polite, but did not capture the spontaneous joy that occurred at the end of Sondheim’s A little Night Music last year. The Light in the Piazza was still pleasurable and definitely a fine entertainment for a summer evening. TCR is to be admired for choosing and presenting it.  

 

DEATH IN A GHOSTLY HUE by Susan Van Kirk

 

I’ll start with my bias warning. Susan Van Kirk was our next-door neighbor. My wife is one of her beta readers. While teaching English at our local high school, Sue taught both of our children and my wife taught her kids in elementary school. Sue was and remains one of my wife’s best friends. This also means there are identifiable local references throughout the book that can only be enjoyed by a real resident of the fictional town used as a setting. These are meaningless to a general reader, but they are sure delightful for us.  

“So, say it ain’t so Sue!”  Not the final Art Center Mystery! Just because Jill banished the ghost, there are plenty of other loose ends to tie up. The love affair with Sam is just getting going, the personality change in Ivan Truelove needs explaining, Louise’s dating habits could bring on catastrophe at any moment, and Jill’s family cannot stay out of trouble for more than twenty minutes. All those valuable paintings from the judge might be a target for thieves and surely the Babbling Brook Community Church must be ripe for another foray. I admit finding another body in the basement of the art center might be pushing it, but what might Jill do with a body found frozen inside the big freezer plant next to the slaughterhouse?  Just a thought.

Back to business. Death in a Ghostly Hue, is Sue’s third art center mystery and I really do hope not the last.  All of the first three are set in a small midwestern town and take place in and around its Art Center. Jill Madison, the main character, runs the enterprise and the ins and outs of mounting exhibitions and the problems of working with a board of directors are given full shrift. The center itself has been endowed by Jill’s mother, who was a talented and successful painter.

The beginning of the book seemed a bit too obvious as a conflict set-up for me. We learn of a man named Quinn Parsons, who killed Jill Madison’s parents eight years ago in a drunk driving incident and has now suddenly returned to town to make amends publicly. From there the plot moves on so quickly that before I could worry about my initial doubts, the killer is himself killed.

Madison’s brother becomes the prime suspect and the novel now really begins. Jill and her quirky friend Angie (all good detectives need a second fiddle) now concentrate on what might explain the behavior of Mr. Parsons and what might be the hidden motive of a new murderer. Undergirding this is an exploration of the nature of forgiveness in the form of the presence of a Civil War ghost meandering about in the art center rafters. Only Jill can see and hear him and he turns out to be the most interesting character in the book as he provides the key to understanding his own 19^th century demise, the killing of Jill’s parents, and the difficulty of forgiveness for an act that continues to haunt long after it has been committed.   

Van Kirk’s work is definitely becoming more sophisticated with each succeeding book she publishes. She shows better and more deft plotting, more interesting characters, and now a definite sense of playful humor. This is a fun read. It goes quickly and we get just enough serious thought about a significant moral issue to give the book more depth than the average cozy mystery.     

Within its genre this offering gets a solid 5 out of 5.