The final song of The Light in the Piazza (presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Calderwood Pavilion through October 18) is called “Fable.” And that’s what this romantic musical based on Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella is: a fairy tale that captures the feeling more than the circumstances of a Romeo and Juliet–like attraction while at the same time acknowledging how fleeting its breathless intensity is like to be. But Adam Guettel’s soaring score, which deserved its 2005 Tony, so captures the exhilaration of hormones arcing over the language barrier that the flame of love seems worth the conflagration.
It’s easy to sneer at the story, which has been adapted by Craig Lucas. It’s 1953, and an overprotective Winston-Salem matron is vacationing in sun-dappled Florence with her emotionally arrested but bodily blossoming daughter when the latter falls hard for the young Florentine who retrieves her runaway hat. We are made to understand that young Clara is damaged, but hers is a vague, charming impairment that mostly manifests itself in seeming childlike and being easily overwhelmed. As her swain is a bit of a kid himself, the match seems apt, if not prudent. But for Clara’s mother, Margaret, it both threatens the nest and casts her own arid union in painful relief.
Scott Edmiston’s production, set by Susan Zeeman Rogers amid folding arches on a sunny canvas that furls at one end, is as tender and lovely as Clara. Musical director José Delgado does justice to the main attraction: Richard Rodgers descendant Guettel’s score. And it’s fun to watch the parade of 1950s wear, with too-tight togs for the Italian men and full-skirted Mad Men ensembles for the American ladies. Among the cast of unknowns, Erica Spyres brings open-mouthed wonder and a pretty if nasal soprano to Clara, and John Bambery is a convincingly young but vocally strong Fabrizio. As Margaret, Georgia native Amelia Broome is both belle and bulwark, and her burnished operatic soprano proves just right in the Piazza.
Related:
Play by Play: May 1, 2009, Autumn garden, Kosher comic, More 
- Play by Play: May 1, 2009
Theater around town
- Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
- Kosher comic
Judy Gold sashays into a press conference with a white apron over her jeans and a tray of rugelach in her hand.
- Play by Play: May 22, 2009
Boston's theater schedule
- Sox trump comedy
"Being bitter is poison and bitter will kill you. Bitter is a root that will grow a poopy tree of death."
- Interview: Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs
"Opera fans have often puzzled over the fact that Poppea does not appear to have a character the audience wants to root for, since everyone has seriously objectionable traits."
- Springer vs. Nero!
Two opera productions overlapping at the Calderwood Pavilion exploit exploitation.
- Teachers and students
Several of this fall's promising jazz performances are clustered around the week of October 18. That marks the 40th-anniversary celebration of the jazz-studies program at New England Conservatory, which, created by Gunther Schuller, established NEC as one of the international twin beacons of jazz education in Boston along with Berklee College of Music.
- Year in Theater: Staged right
It's been a Buckingham Palace season on the local rialto.
- A living history
Since Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is set in a specific place and time, some theatergoers will want to relegate its incidents and attitudes — which surround the Rodney King riots — to history.
- Crucibles
There was room for more than one young Jewish diarist in the occupied Amsterdam of World War II. Anne Frank, who died as a teen, is a 20th-century icon. But until recently, her feisty innocence hid Etty Hillesum's fire.
- Less
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Theater
, Harvard University, Crime, American Repertory Theatre, More
, Harvard University, Crime, American Repertory Theatre, American Repertory Theatre, Paula Vogel, calderwood pavilion, Eurydice Ruhl, Amelia Broome, Brian Bielawski, The Light in the Piazza, Less
