Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 7 The Light in the Piazza

THE MUSICAL Broadway in the 1960s was as keen as Hollywood to retell The Light in the Piazza. Renowned composer Richard Rodgers (one half of Rodgers and Hammerstein) was just one of many hoping to bring it to the stage. Although Spencer had given her agent permission to option the stage rights, after she left him, he tied any permissions up for 20 years until his death in the 1980s. It wasn’t until 1998 that Rodgers’ grandson – composer Adam Guettel – approached the author, now 77, about giving it another try. ‘He seemed very eager about it, and he was a very attractive young man,’ she told the newspaper Indy Week in 2007. ‘But he looked much younger than he was, and I thought, “He’s too young to do all that.”’ However, she liked Guettel’s prior works, Myths and Hymns and the highly-praised Floyd Collins , a musical about a cave explorer who died in 1925. So, she granted the theatrical option for The Light in the Piazza. ‘You don’t get your hopes up. People take options on stories and then, for one reason or another, things don’t get made,’ she said. That seemed the case for Guettel, who took three years to find someone to work on the musical’s book. But once writer Craig Lucas was on board, Spencer started to hear results. ‘UPS would arrive with a little package, and in it was a new song [Guettel] wanted me to hear,’ says Spencer. ‘He told me all the words to a new one in a restaurant in New York. He sang a new piece to me over the telephone.’ Guettel even moved for a season to Florence, where the story is set. The resulting score showed his knack for defying convention – skirting the boundaries between Broadway, opera and art music with lush, dreamlike orchestrations. After finally hearing Guettel’s completed musical, Spencer seemed to find a new appreciation for the story she once called her albatross. ‘Though we’re really worlds different from each other, he got it,’ she told Indy Week. ‘That’s the amazing thing. The music is just soaring; it just catches you up right away. It’s almost miraculous.’ Lyric Opera House | 11 Original London Cast 2019