Friday May 9

Play brings romance into 'Light'

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

Is love crazy or sane? That's one theme in the Broadway hit musical "The Light in the Piazza," running in a sweet production at Lucie Stern Theater, presented by Palo Alto Players.

"Light in the Piazza" is a chick play with songs, developed from a 1960 romance novel. The Broadway production won five Tony Awards in 2005.

In "Piazza," it's 1954. An American mother takes her daughter on an art and history tour of Florence, Italy. The daughter promptly falls in love at first sight with an Italian boy.

In the romantic time warp of this show, the would-be lovers' hormones are way out of control. Amused, the mother blocks them. Complications ensue.

"Light in the Piazza" is based on a 1960 novella by Mississippi writer Elizabeth Spencer. That book was made into a 1962 move with Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton. Now the original story has been turned into a chick musical.

The first half of "Light in the Piazza" offers a dazzled American tourist's snapshot of Florence, seductive, but stereotyped. In the Palo Alto production, scenic designer Kuo-Hao Lo's wonderfully broken and fragmented Florentine Renaissance architectural sets, imbued with lighting designer Michael Palumbo's Tuscan reds, create a magical world of romance, heartbreak and hope.

Eventually we discover that daughter Clara has a dark secret. This makes the show's second half more interesting, as personal intrigue threatens happiness through a variety of twists and turns.

In Florence, we realize, the mother is trying to relive memories of her own husband, from whom she is now estranged. The plot thickens. This is a play set in a time, not long after World War II, when Americans were respected in Italy.

In the Palo Alto production, 17-year-old high school senior Dominique Bonino offers a spectacularly guileless and openhearted performance as starry-eyed daughter Clara. Bonino will be a star some day.

She has the ability that some great actors have to allow her feelings to rise right to the surface, leave her body, and possess an audience. She's an exciting performer.

Her very moving song "The Light in the Piazza" juxtaposes love with heartbreak. Kate McCormick displays serious operatic chops as Clara's Florentine counterpart Franca, in "The Joy You Feel," reflecting on the painful paradoxes of love.

"Light in the Piazza" is a delicate show. The pure frothy romance of the first act demands a staging very different in tone and mood from the later intrigues of the second half.

On the night I attended, these first half flights of romance between Clara and Fabrizio (Justin Taylor Nixon) still hadn't quite grown a stable enough footing to anchor the show.

In part, "Light in the Piazza" compares budding romance with the angrier and more resolute lives of people who have once experienced that romance, but who have since forgotten about it, or lost it.

The romantic impulses of the two young people allow parents and others to reflect, sometimes ruefully, on their own adventures of the heart. If you're a fan of romantic love, you won't want to miss "Light in the Piazza."

Rating: Three and a half stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.