Estimated reading time: 1 minute
We left the Food and Wine Festival and headed for the Orange County Performing arts Center to see Light In The Piazza. The Light in the Piazza is a musical with a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel. Based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer, it is set in Florence and Rome in the summer of 1953. A young American tourist, Clara Johnson, meets and falls for young Italian Fabrizio Naccarelli. When Clara’s mother, Margaret learns of the affair, she opposes it for reasons that only gradually become clear to the audience.
The score breaks from the traditional Broadway popular or rock sound by moving into the territory of Neoromantic classical music and opera, with unexpected harmonic shifts and extended melodic structures. It is more heavily orchestrated than most Broadway scores. Many of the lyrics are in Italian or broken English, as many of the characters are fluent only in Italian
