'The Light in the Piazza' at Villanova Theatre

Westerns are still popular, of course, and so are musicals; it’s just that you can’t seem to make them anymore. The Light in the Piazza, with book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, was an attempt at resuscitation, and when it premiered on Broadway in 2005 it won a slew of Tonys. Even John Simon said nice things about it. Now a decade has passed, and the Villanova Theatre’s revival, directed by Valerie Joyce, gives audiences a chance to assess it anew.

Guettel has the right bloodlines; he is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, who was approached in the early 1960s with Elizabeth Spencer’s novella, originally published in the New Yorker. Rodgers declined, no doubt seeing it as a knockoff of West Side Story. His instinct was correct. Set in postwar Florence and featuring a tale of young love nearly thwarted by the older generation, it’s Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending. There’s always room for Shakespeare’s great tale, told one way or another, but not with Leonard Bernstein’s score and Jerome Robbins’s choreography still fresh in mind.

Too little too late?

Guettel decided to take a crack at Spencer’s version in the late 1990s and found a collaborator in playwright Craig Lucas. Both men left the setting as it was, in what was now a remoter Italy, closer to Puccini than Berlusconi. The classic musical had been built around big show tunes, but, like bel canto opera, it was no longer considered sophisticated enough. The more fashionable model was derived from the through-composed operas of Wagner and his successors. To be sure, bel canto was still popular, and revivals of South Pacific were welcome. It’s just that their success couldn’t be repeated; that cultural moment had passed.

The story line of The Light in the Piazza might be described as Shakespeare with a pinch of Henry James. Margaret Johnson (Amy Acchione Myers), unhappily married to a crass businessman, is squiring her daughter Clara (Christine Petrini) through Italy. It’s love at first sight when Clara and Fabrizio (Peter Andrew Danzig) see each other in the street. Their romance develops shyly but irresistibly; the lady, though, is not for marrying. Clara looks okay to us for the girl of 18 or 20 she appears to be, but she’s actually 26 and emotionally a child. Margaret wants to protect her while exposing her to a sanitized Grand Tour, and, for its part, Fabrizio’s family wants no part of what it regards as an aged spinster. Of course love will triumph in the end, thanks to a change of heart by Margaret and an unconvincing liaison with Fabrizio’s father (Paul Weagraff).

Craig Lucas doesn’t help matters with a book that contains such howlers as Clara’s observation that the light in the piazza is really the human heart. Lucas has done much better with his own stage works, but the plot premises offer little opportunity for development, not to say credibility. Guettel’s score tries to punch things up a bit, but has little distinction. The production, scaled to the modest dimensions of the Vasey Hall Theatre, is well designed by David P. Gordon, and Jerold R. Forsyth’s lighting is particularly evocative. The cast works hard and devotedly, although high notes were sometimes flattened. Some of the numbers were sung in Italian. Verdi was not the result.

Styles and genres evolve, and the American musical theater will no doubt find new forms of expression. The Light in the Piazza isn’t its beacon though. It’s very much a thing of the past.