Taking a chance on LOVE

It's finally going to happen.

When Piedmont Opera presents Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza three times in the Stevens Center beginning Friday, the performances will mark the first time that the company has staged a work by a living composer other than Gian Carlo Menotti. Piedmont Opera, which was founded in 1978, staged Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors irregularly before he died last year.

Light, a Tony Award-winning musical, opened in 2005 at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in New York. It is based on Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novel of the same name. James Allbritten, Piedmont Opera's artistic director and resident conductor, began pushing to bring the show here after he heard a CD and attended two performances in New York.

"I'm excited," Allbritten said. "It (Light) is the work of a living composer who is writing in our own time, with our own voice, about two ladies from our hometown."

The two fictional ladies in question are Winston-Salem tourists vacationing in Florence, Italy, during the 1950s. They do much to explain why Allbritten wanted Piedmont Opera to become one the first organizations to put on Light after it ran in New York, was broadcast on television and went on a national tour. "Never has there been an opportunity for a Winston-Salemite to come to the theater and sort of … look at these people and self-examine and think and wonder what it's like to be really in those people's places,"

Allbritten said. One of the tourists, Margaret Johnson, played by Jill Gardner, is married to a tobacco-company executive. The other is her daughter, Clara, played by Sarah Jane McMahon. Clara is 26, but she has the mental development of a 10-year-old as the result of a traumatic brain injury in childhood.

When Clara falls for an Italian man named Fabrizio Naccarelli, played by Eric Bryan, Margaret struggles with what to do about the love affair. Should she, as her husband desires, keep protecting her daughter? Or should she let go and allow her to have as much happiness as possible?

Light may be an unusual, touching love story with a marketing-friendly connection to Winston-Salem. But it is not among those tried-and-true gems, such as Puccini's La Boheme, that Piedmont Opera routinely programs to attract a full house. There have been several unusual challenges involved in pulling it off.

The most pressing has been persuading local opera patrons to plunk down as much as $70 to take in something they have either never seen before or do not know well. Last week, Bonnie Poindexter, Piedmont Opera's executive director, said that there were still "way too many tickets to be sold."

"Call now," she said. "I'm very nervous."

Poindexter also spoke of having to come up with lots of extra money to finance lighting, sets, costumes and sound (to amplify the spoken dialogue). All the technical stuff in Light "had to be designed from scratch," said Poindexter, who often saves money by renting a show's sets and costumes from other companies.

Guettel, the grandson of Richard Rodgers, is represented by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization. Piedmont Opera has already paid that organization several thousand dollars to secure a license for Light, and royalties will be due when Light's run is over as well -- something all but unknown to Piedmont Opera, which produces older shows that have long been in the public domain.

All told, production costs have come to $370,000 -- when, in most cases, the company will pay between $200,000 and $250,000.

"This was a real new endeavor for us," Poindexter said. "We didn't know if we could afford it.… There are a lot of people in this town who stepped up and said, ‘We will help you.' We're not short. We raised it."

Unlike the cast members of past Piedmont Opera shows, those in Light have never done it before. Presumably, many are finding its vocal challenges similar to those of an opera -- which, technically speaking, Light is not, since it includes spoken dialogue and is not sung all the way through.

"You really need legitimate voices to sing this," McMahon said. "It's not something you can belt. You need to be classically trained to do the music justice."

Allbritten said that the music in Light "is remarkable enough that I think it completely stands the test of any opera house." He praised the way in which the show is constructed, both in terms of its libretto, by Craig Lucas, and its music.

"(It) is quite remarkable and very operatic," he said. "The construct has nothing to do with most musical theater that I know.… There is balance everywhere."

Allbritten pointed out that every musical has a title song -- and, more often than not, an "uncomfortable moment when everybody's trying to figure out how to shoehorn (it) into the show."

The way that Light's title song is inserted at the beginning of the show's second act comes off masterfully.

"Clara's upset," Allbritten said. "She's had to leave her boyfriend behind. Her mother has taken her to Rome (from Florence) to get her out of that situation. She Clara) starts to sing about the moment in the piazza when the two of them met. She can't cogently put it together. She's (singing), ‘He's all I think about. He's all I see. He is my light in the piazza.'

"It's the most effortless title song I can think of. It's amazing that they've managed to make that the center peg around which the whole show rises and falls down again."

As for the dramatics, Dorothy Danner, the production's stage director, said that she had never done anything quite like Light before.

"There's an elusive quality," she said. "I keep thinking it's like some impressionist painting.… It feels like it needs to be handled differently."

Allbritten seems to have done just that even before rehearsals began last month, having made a conscious decision to cast two Southerners to play the Johnsons. Gardner, who'll play Margaret Johnson, is from Winston-Salem. And McMahon, who'll play Johnson's daughter, Clara, is from New Orleans.

"We're in Winston-Salem," Allbritten said. "These two ladies are supposed to be from Winston-Salem. We have to get it right or the whole audience will walk out and go, ‘What the hell was that?'"

Gardner suggested that her background would be an asset.

"Texture-wise, there's a lot that I bring to this piece because I am from Winston-Salem," she said. "I am very much a Southern woman. The accent is completely indicative of the area."

Gardner also spoke of her character's unusual "journey," a journey prompted by the fact that "a possibility that she never thought would open for Clara becomes a real reality."

In choosing to stand by Clara and her happiness -- and defying the expectations of others -- Margaret "herself is liberated from cynicism, from bitterness, from guilt (and) pain."

■ At 11 a.m. Monday during a press conference on stage at the Stevens Center, Mayor Allen Joines will proclaim the corner of Fourth and Liberty streets to be Light in the Piazza Way.

■ Piedmont Opera will present The Light in the Piazza next weekend at the Stevens Center. Shows will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. next Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14. The opening-night performance is a gala, with cocktails before the show and dinner after it. Cocktails and dinner cost $75 per person. Tickets are $15-$70; see www.piedmontopera.org or call 336-724-3202.

■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.