One of Broadway’s big stars is in St. Louis this summer, but she’s not at The Muny. Two-time Tony Award nominee Kate Baldwin is starring in The Light in the Piazza as it makes its debut at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. It may not be your idea of opera, but she is terrific, and so is the entire production.
Baldwin plays Margaret Johnson, a Southern wife and mother navigating a precarious situation as she and her daughter tour Florence, Italy, in 1953. Margaret’s world is shaken when her daughter falls in love—suddenly, capriciously—with a young Italian she meets while sightseeing. But her daughter has a secret even she herself does not fully understand, making what could be a mere culture clash much more fraught.
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
Baldwin says she came to Opera Theatre because the show is one of her favorites, yet she’d never gotten to perform in it. When Opera Theatre artistic director Patricia Racette somehow tracked down Baldwin’s phone number and pitched her on coming to St. Louis to play Margaret, she was dazzled by the idea, including the fact that the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra would be part of the experience. “It has been a dream role of mine,” she says. “And I thought to myself, ‘Well, when am I going to get to sing this with an orchestra like this?’”
In crafting her character, Baldwin drew on her grandmother, an “exacting” Texan also named Margaret. “If my grandmother Margaret had been born 30 or 40 years later, she would have been running a Fortune 500 company,” she says. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”
I first saw The Light in the Piazza on its original Broadway run, back in 2005, which included the great Victoria Clark as Margaret in a Tony-winning performance. (Fun fact: Matthew Morrison, later made famous by Glee, played the handsome young Italian, and I’ve never been able to think of him without an Italian accent.) I’ve raved about that show—and Clark’s performance—ever since. But honestly: Baldwin is better. She’s an incredible singer, but she also finds the humor in her character, and playing off Paulo Szot, himself a Tony Award winner, it’s magic. Buoyed by their chemistry and Adam Guettel’s gorgeous score, Saturday’s opening night performance captivated the audience so completely, they shared eruptions of laughter and even an audible gasp.
Baldwin says she’s blown away by Szot’s comedic timing. The Brazilian baritone is best known for his portrayal of Emile de Becque in the acclaimed 2008 revival of South Pacific, a role he’ll revisit at The Muny this summer. This heartthrob, however, is hilarious—and so is Baldwin. “Saturday night was amazing for us,” she confesses. “Having a full house and having people react with such big laughter! There was a scene that ran twice as long because of all the laughing.”
Andrew Jorgensen, the general director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, is frank about The Light in the Piazza representing an experiment. Unlike most OTSL productions, it has a fair amount of dialogue, which means the performers must wear mics—an anathema to opera purists. But, as the company’s artistic director Patricia Racette explains in this season’s program, the border between opera and musical theatre has always been porous. “Ever since I first saw The Light in the Piazza, I’ve carried it with me,” she explains. “It is one of the most vocally sophisticated scores in musical theater, and it asks for the same emotional precision we expect from opera singers.”
Personally, I find the cross-pollination exciting. Broadway musicals loom large in pop culture these days—yet at what price? Far too many of them seem like juvenile fare aimed at a very restless common denominator. Extraordinary dancing, sure, but what are we to take from a musical like & Juliet, which plumbs the canon of—wait for it—’90s boy bands and Britney Spears? It’s a jukebox of pure nostalgia that flatters its audience’s every conviction. A fun night out, but does it challenge us? By expanding its definition of what opera can be, Opera Theatre is allowing St. Louis the opportunity to see a much more sophisticated work, one that would surely be too subtle for The Fox or The Muny but feels just right in the intimate confines of Loretto-Hilton Center.
And its center is Baldwin’s portrayal, a mother earnestly struggling to do right by her child. We feel her anxiety, we feel her love, we feel the daring in the risk she decides to take. We don’t know what happens to these characters after the curtain falls—but the stakes feel high enough that we’ll be thinking about them for days to come. A jukebox musical could never.
