The original-cast album of Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza was released yesterday. I’ve been listening to my advance copy ever since it arrived, and I’ve been feeling something unusual and unexpected: I’m angry with those benighted drama critics whose mixed-to-poor reviews of this extraordinary show may have kept unsuspecting people from seeing it.
Fortunately, Stephen Holden of the New York Times, one of the most receptive and perceptive critics I know (he ought to write a blog!), has published a deeply comprehending review of the CD, and for the moment I can do no better than to quote from it:
“The Light in the Piazza,” whose sublime original cast album was released today by Nonesuch Records, has the most intensely romantic score of any Broadway musical since “West Side Story,” unless you count Andrew Lloyd Webber’s kitschy, pontificating melodic oratory for “The Phantom of the Opera.” There is nothing kitschy about Mr. Guettel’s songs, which share with Stephen Sondheim’s equally great but less overtly tuneful score for “Passion” a fascination with mad love.
Exquisitely arranged and orchestrated by the composer with Ted Sperling and Bruce Coughlin, “The Light in the Piazza” unfolds as a diaphanous swirl of strings and harp, flecked with reeds, guitar and delicate percussion; the more you listen to it, the more its mists assume form and substance….
Because Mr. Guettel is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, one of the all-time greatest Broadway melodists, the score suggests a personal conversation between generations. “The Light in the Piazza” takes place only four years after the Broadway opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein blockbuster “South Pacific.”
Mr. Guettel’s songs share the heady romantic spirit of “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Younger Than Springtime,” ballads from that show that helped define the catechism of courtship in post-World War II America. If his melodies suggest sophisticated, angular refractions of his grandfather’s, his lyrics question the homilies attached to Rodgers’s melodies….
I’ll be writing more about The Light in the Piazza, here or elsewhere, but for the moment I suggest you heed Holden’s words and buy the original-cast CD right now–then go see the show for yourself.
As I mentioned above, I got my copy of The Light in the Piazza slightly in advance of the rest of the listening public. This is one of the great privileges of being a critic: I’m listening to Erin McKeown’s We Will Become Like Birds, and you’re not. (It comes out June 28.) Sarah and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about how thrilled we were when publishers started sending us review copies of unpublished books. Believe it or not, I still have my first set of bound galleys, stuffed in a box somewhere or other. They’re 23 years old, which is how long I’ve been a book reviewer, God help me. Even so, I can still remember exactly how it felt when I opened the envelope and held them in my hand: I knew something the rest of the world didn’t.
That’s the way I’m feeling right this minute as I listen to Erin McKeown sing “Air.” Eight months ago, Our Girl called me on her cell phone from the street outside the Chicago club where she’d just heard McKeown sing that as-yet-unrecorded song. She was so excited
about discovering a wonderful new artist that she couldn’t wait to go home and e-mail me–she had to call and tell me on the spot. Now I’m hearing the very same song for the very first time, and feeling the same overwhelming desire to spread the word. Fortunately, I don’t have to call all of you up one at a time. I love blogging. I love music. I love art. Truth to tell, I love pretty much everything, at least for the moment. Art will do that to you.