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

We’re here in deepest Clapham, where rehearsals are well underway for the London premiere of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ The Light in the Piazza . When did the piece first cross your radar? I actually heard it at Lincoln Center during the Broadway run with Victoria Clark and Kelli O’Hara. It was an incredible cast and I loved it immediately. It’s an interesting story that’s extremely well told, and the music is rapturous. In music theatre, it’s a very fine line between musicals and opera. I personally hate making a distinction at all – it’s all music theatre, but The Light in the Piazza is that most refined of hybrids that gravitates between two worlds. Even vocally there are characters in the show who have to be operatically trained because of the range and the requirements of the writing, and there are those who don’t. I think it is a perfect bridge. It was presented at Lincoln Center, as opposed to a stand-alone Broadway theatre, and it definitely is a refined work. There are lots of pieces like that and I think increasingly in the US they’re finding homes in performing arts centres and opera houses. We just produced West Side Story at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and it’s the greatest-selling piece in the history of the opera company. Too many contemporary operas and musicals, to my mind, sound generic. The musical style doesn’t quite reflect the source material. Adam Guettel is quite the opposite – his first masterpiece, Floyd Collins, totally immersed itself in that Kentucky setting of bluegrass music. Piazza is just so Italian… Yes, and even within Piazza there are different styles – almost contemporary classical writing by tonality and the complexity, and then you also have absolute pop numbers. So, there’s a wide variety within this piece. There’s a terrifying sequence where Clara’s trying to find an address and the stage direction is that she keeps seeing these sinister figures – it’s quite a moment… That’s an extreme scene and the one we just rehearsed is also, where Clara is having a meltdown. Clara has more of the challenging writing – the writing for my character is evocative and wonderful, but there’s no hysteria in Margaret’s music. What I love about this character is the fact that she’s a mother, that she is dealt a very complicated hand and that she has to sort it out herself alone in Italy. For the time, for 1953, it is quite an extraordinary story. ‘WITHIN PIAZZA THERE ARE DIFFERENT STYLES – ALMOST CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL WRITING BY TONALITY… THEN ABSOLUTE POP NUMBERS’ A VOICE FOR ALL SEASONS ONE OF THE GREATEST SOPRANOS IN THEWORLD, RENÉE FLEMINGHAS SUNG FOR US PRESIDENTS, QUEEN ELIZABETH II AND DIGNITARIES AT THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE CEREMONY. WE ASKED HER ABOUT TRAVERSING THE BORDER BETWEENOPERAANDMUSICALS Lyric Opera House | 13