"Piazza" comes home just as beautiful

Graced with more heart, enriched music and a gorgeous production, the Broadway musical "The Light in the Piazza" has circled its way back to Seattle. And that's a good thing.

When the Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas show had its world premiere here at the Intiman Theatre in 2003, this tale of a mother and daughter's life-changing sojourn in 1953 Italy was a pen-and-ink sketch.

In Bartlett Sher's splendid staging, it is now a vibrant oil painting — a thing of beauty, though not unflawed.

On opening night of this touring run, the flaws were exacerbated by bombastic amplification that at times painfully undermined Guettel's complex score and did no favors to the opera-trained voices of the lead players. A quick remedy must be found, or the patrons will get a boomier, shriller "Piazza" than they deserve.

That aside, there is much to love about "Light in the Piazza," one of few recent Broadway musicals that dares to explore, with compassion and intelligence, the joys, mysteries and challenges of love — romantic and familial.

Based on Elizabeth Spencer's novella, the show has a Tony Award-winning score by Guettel that's grown more rapturous and seductive (though still problematic). An enhanced string section and graceful orchestrations by Guettel and Ted Sperling are big pluses. And the show's book, by Lucas, has also grown, in clarity, poignancy and humor.

The narrator is the sardonic, perceptive Texas matron Margaret Johnson (played with a little brassiness and much conviction by Christine Andreas). Margaret visits Florence with her pretty, oddly childlike adult daughter, Clara (Katie Rose Clarke), to soak up some of the European culture many Americans hungered for after World War II.

But this protective mother is taken aback when Clara is ardently pursued by Fabrizio Naccarelli (the very engaging David Burnham), a puppyish young Italian.

Angry at first, then scared, then hopeful, Margaret worries Fabrizio's middle-class Florentine family, led by his proud father (played by David Ledingham), will encourage the match. When they do, she struggles over whether to reveal that Clara's innocence is due to a childhood brain injury.

Some fuzzy plot points in Intiman's earlier "Piazza" have become more cogent. The emotive Italians are still painted at first with too broad a brush, but the benign and challenging cultural tensions between Margaret and the Naccarellis (who speak mostly in Italian, and also include Fabrizio's mother and his battling brother and sister-in-law) are more nuanced.

And "Piazza" has gained considerably more emotional impact and visual splendor — which, in a curious way, go hand in hand.

Michael Yeargan's entrancing scenic design and Christopher Akerlind's achingly beautiful lighting shift the story seamlessly between monumental settings (the Uffizi Gallery, a glorious piazza sheltered by towering ancient buildings), to simply defined intimate spaces (the Naccarelli flat, Margaret's hotel room).

Both Yeargan and Akerlind won well-deserved Tony Awards for their work, as did Catherine Zuber for her divine period costumes.

Under Sher's refined command, the story's passionate romance and parental dilemmas play out on a micro/macro scale. The public scenes occur against the backdrop of a bustling Italian city — a commentary on the crazy truism that life becomes wildly heightened for new lovers, while the rest of the world goes about its business.

Margaret's own (disappointing) love life is also made clearer, largely through phone chats with her irritated, stateside spouse Roy (Seattle's John Procaccino) and in her stirring musical soliloquy "Dividing Day" — arguably the score's best song.

Yet it is Clara who has deepened most, musically and emotionally. In Clarke's dewy, velvety voiced turn, Clara's guileless charm is irresistible, her frustrated tantrums more sympathetic and her need to love more touching.

And Guettel's score? The swirling eddies of sound under the dialogue are still rapturous. And the melding of lyricism and dissonance, grand-opera devices and show-tune conventions, can still be needlessly jarring and overly schematic.

That said, the score is musically bolder and more interesting than that of any new Broadway musical in a long while. And when Guettel's melodic gift dominates, in such songs as "Let's Walk," "Love to Me," and the glorious title tune, "Piazza" is luminous.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com