Interviews with Christine
 

Talkin' Broadway - Seattle

A young Christine Andreas made her Broadway debut as Eliza in the 1976 Broadway revival of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady. She then went on to acclaimed star turns in Broadway revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (as Laurey) and Rodgers & Hart's On Your Toes (Frankie Frayne). She returned to Broadway in 1997 as Marguerite in Frank Wildhorn's The Scarlet Pimpernel and essayed a rather more sophisticated and mature Rodgers and Hart female lead, Vera Simpson, in the Prince Music Theatre of Philadelphia's Pal Joey, winning a 2002 Barrymore award. Most recently, she headed up the acclaimed national tour of The Light in the Piazza with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, the award-winning grandson of Richard Rodgers. The complex role of Margaret hits home with the actress, who gave Talkin' Broadway this interview by phone on a Saturday morning from the tour stop in Portland, Oregon, before bringing Piazza back to Seattle (it world-premiered here three years ago), where it has just opened a two-week run.

David-Edward Hughes: Good morning, Christine. Thanks for taking time to chat with me. I know you have a show today ... 

CA: I've got two, baby. But, I'm happy to talk to you. 

DEH: Is this your Seattle debut? 

CA: You know, actually not. When I did On Your Toes, many years ago, we actually previewed in Seattle, at the 5th Avenue. But that was so long ago that for all intents and purposes, it probably is my first time. 

DEH: The name Richard Rodgers has certainly been a big part of your career. I love the 1979 revival cast album of Oklahoma!, and I wish I'd seen it. 

CA: What was great about it was that it was one of the first revivals to be done with a lot of the original influences, Rodgers himself, Billy Hammerstein directing, Agnes De Mille, Gemze de Lappe, a lot of the original creative energy, and that made it special. It was a beautiful production. 

DEH: As Adam Guettel is Rodgers' grandson, what similarities and differences do you find in their composing styles, having now sung scores by both of them? 

CA: Adam has the same respect for the craft that his grandfather had. He is very considerate and educated. He's sensitive, very much a romanticist. The difference is the perspective. Adam is influenced by pop, and yet he's not afraid to throw in something from the other spectrum, semi-operatic. Maybe the most striking thing ... where he goes so deep into the psyche of the character, I think by the end of the show, when I'm singing "Fable" that I'm singing on the rhythm of my intuition, before my thoughts have even formed and I'm just spirited out. That's really wild, it is. I've never done that before. It's like an art song, and I've really never done that before, so it's just amazing. 
   
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Portland Tribune-Review

Christine Andreas looks forward singing the last line of “The Light in the Piazza.”

Not because the star of the hit Broadway musical needs a break after spending all but eight minutes on stage. But because that final number, “Fable,” is the climax of a show that begins as a simple girl-meets-boy romance, then opens up to cover many different aspects of love.

As she sings the last five words, “… the light in the piazza,” Andreas says she “usually feels a warmth and a letting go, as (her character) Margaret goes into an altered state. She realizes there is more to life than she thought before.”

It’s this maternal epiphany, which is two hours and 15 minutes in the making, that gives the story its drive. Andreas plays Margaret Johnson, a married woman from North Carolina touring Italy with her daughter in 1953.

Andreas describes her character as “someone who crosses every T, even for other people. She likes to stay in control.” And while Margaret can handle the sensuous pleasures of Italy – the naked marble statues, the food, the vivacious Italians – her greatest challenge comes when her daughter, Clara, 26, falls in love with Fabrizio, a local boy of 20.

Spoiler alert: Margaret reveals that her daughter has never been the same since she was kicked in the head by a Shetland pony on her 12th birthday. The result is a young woman who is childlike in the sense that she’s fun and innocent, but also in that she is mentally immature.
   
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Andreas plays Johnson, a middle-aged woman from Winston-Salem, N.C., in the national touring production of Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' musical "The Light in the Piazza."

The musical arrives Tuesday as a presentation of the PNC Broadway Across America -- Pittsburgh series.

Adapted from Elizabeth Spencer's novella that also was the basis for the 1962 movie with the same title, "The Light in the Piazza" is set in the Tuscan town of Florence in the summer of 1953.

An unexpected gust of wind -- or, possibly, fate -- sets in motion a romance between Clara and a handsome young Italian.

Despite barriers of language and culture and Margaret's opposition, the relationship flourishes until a secret the mother has been suppressing is revealed. Revealing the truth forces Margaret to reconsider her own future as well as that of her daughter.

"The journey is really Margaret's ability to love," Andreas says. "It's a mother-love journey, a self-acceptance journey."
 
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Orange County Register

From the moment she sang the first note of the first song in "The Light in the Piazza," Christine Andreas knew that this was the musical – and the signature role – that she'd been waiting for all her life.

"It's a thinking person's musical, a feeling person's musical," the Broadway star said of the Tony-winning creation by composer-lyricist Adam Guettel and writer Craig Lucas, which opens this week at the Ahmanson Theatre. "It's not a huge musical. It's set in Florence and looks beautiful – it won all these design awards – but it's not sensational. There are no helicopters or falling chandeliers in this show. It's a fragile story of the heart."
 
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St. Petersburg Times 

Christine Andreas finds more than a few parallels between her life and The Light in the Piazza, the Tony Award-winning musical that she is starring in.

For one thing, the composer and lyricist of the show is Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers.  Andreas' favorite role "If I had to choose one" was Laurey in a 1979 Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. She also was in another Rodgers show on Broadway, playing songwriter Frankie Frayne in a revival of the ballet musical On Your Toes in 1983. Both performances earned her Tony nominations.

But where Andreas feels most connected to The Light in the Piazza, which opens this week at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, is through the character she is portraying, Margaret Johnson, a North Carolinian on extended vacation in Italy with her daughter, Clara, in the 1950s. Clara is a gorgeous young woman, but she is arrested emotionally, the result of being kicked by a pony when she was 12.
 
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The Orlando Sentinel

If you believe that certain roles were destined for certain people, you almost have to believe that 
destiny had Christine Andreas in mind.

Why else did The Light in the Piazza come along exactly when she was ready for it to happen?

When the Tony Award-winning musical comes to Orlando Sept. 19, Andreas will be playing the 
central character: Margaret Johnson, the devoted mother of a troubled daughter who longs to break free.

Just three months ago, Andreas was packing off her 18-year-old son, who was born with developmental 
disabilities, to live away from home for the first time.

To Andreas, the parallels are extraordinary.
 
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The Cincinnati Post

It's not a stretch to say that life has been preparing Broadway star Christine Andreas for her role in "The Light in the Piazza" for almost 20 years.

In this musical, which opens the new 2006-2007 Broadway Across America -Cincinnati season Tuesday at the Aronoff Center, downtown, Andreas plays the role of Margaret Johnson.  Margaret and her 26-year old daughter Clara (Elena Shaddow) are on a vacation in Italy.  A gust of wind in a piazza carries Clara's hat away and it is retrieved by a handsome Italian who barely speaks English.

That chance meeting in Craig Lucas' romantic book, based on the novella by Elizabeth Spencer, launches a love affair with complications - Clara has the mental capacity of a child.
 
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San Francisco Chronicle

So a few months ago, Andreas placed her son, now 19 but with the mental abilities of a 4-year-old, in a group home. "He wanted his independence," she says, "and this seemed to be the best place for him to have it."

And now she finds herself onstage in a role that in many ways parallels her own life, as Margaret Johnson, the North Carolina wife and mother who takes her special needs child, Clara, to Florence, Italy, in "The Light in the Piazza." Along the way, Margaret finds herself and allows Clara to live her own life. The show opens its national tour Friday in San Francisco at the Orpheum Theatre, with Andreas playing the part that won a Tony award for Victoria Clark.
 
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TheatreMania.com

Once Broadway's ingenue of choice in stellar revivals of My Fair Lady (1976), Oklahoma! (1979), and On Your Toes (1983), Christine Andreas has now taken on the plum role of Margaret Johnson in The Light in the Piazza. She heads the first national touring company of the glorious Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas musical based on Elizabeth Spencer's beloved novella of the same title, with Elena Shaddow playing her "special" child, Clara, and David Burnham as the lovestruck Fabrizio Nacarelli.

After a hiatus of several years, Christine returned to Broadway in 1997 as Marguerite St. Just in The Scarlet Pimpernel. During that hiatus, she cared for her son, Mac -- who, like the fictional Clara, is developmentally disabled. I recently spoke with Christine about life, her career, and the year-long Piazza tour, which begins at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco on August 1.
 
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Playbill Online

"Well, that's been the last 20 years," says Christine Andreas, when citing the Adam Guettel lyric from The Light in the Piazza, the powerfully moving, award-winning musical that she will bring to cities across the country during the next year. Andreas is specially suited for the role of a mother trying to protect her child while on vacation in Italy, for she, like Piazza's Margaret Johnson, is the parent of a developmentally delayed child.

In fact, during a work session while auditioning for the Guettel-Craig Lucas musical, Andreas thought, "'Are they peeking in on my life?' Because it so does embody the issues of somebody parenting a kid who is not in the loop of other kids." Andreas is mom to 19-year-old Mac, who just over a month ago began a new life in a group home. "Mac started to say to me at 17, 'I can do this. I can do that. I want to do this,'" explains the ever-youthful singing actress, "and he was indicating that he really wanted to move on and be independent. . . . And this group home opened up, and it's 15 minutes from my house, and it was perfect. Wonderful guys in the house, really cool guys with similar issues, and he's really happy. And," she adds with a laugh, "Now he'll go, 'Hi, Mom. Bye!'"
 
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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

5 QUESTIONS FOR / CHRISTINE ANDREAS

By Wendell Brock – Staff
Sunday, July 9, 2006

Like her character, Andreas has a child with learning disabilities. "My life with Mac is the main reason I want to do this piece," Andreas says of her 18-year-old son, who suffers from what she terms "pervasive developmental delay." 
 
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 "The Light in the Piazza" Articles
 

BroadwayWorld.com

In modern musicals, abundant and unabashed romance isn’t easily found. 

For years, however, composer Adam Guettel — the grandson of Richard Rodgers, one of the great American musical-theater composers — had wanted to write a love story. 

The result: The Light in the Piazza, which lighted up Broadway in 2005. 

The touring production will open Tuesday in the Palace Theatre. 

"For whatever reason, that kind of music — music that sounds like falling in love — was churning around in me and pouring out of me," Guettel, 42, said from New York. 

He joined playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) in adapting the 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer. (The book also inspired a 1962 film.) 

The New York Times praised the production as having "the most romantic score of any Broadway musical since West Side Story." 

The contemporary plot is universal, according to Broadway veteran Christine Andreas, who stars in the national tour. 

"This is a delicate, gentle, soft and witty chamber piece," she said recently, "about real people who subtly work their way into your heart."  
 
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BroadwayWorld.com

Los Angeles welcomed The Light in the Piazza Wednesday evening at the Center Theatre Group's Ahmanson Theatre, and celebrated opening night for the touring Broadway production.
 
Now in it's 40th season at the Music Center, the Ahmanson will host Piazza, winner of 6 Tony Awards, 5 Drama Desk Awards and 2 Outer Critics Circle Awards, through December 10, 2006.
 
"In this lush, romantic new musical set in 1953 on a Florentine piazza suffused with golden summer light, a young American woman named Clara falls in love with a young Italian named Fabrizio. It’s love at first sight for both of them, but it’s a love that causes great concern for Clara’s mother, Margaret Johnson, who is traveling through Italy with her daughter. Margaret is fiercely protective of Clara, who is not all that she appears to be, but Margaret also finds herself drawn to the intoxicating spell that Italy casts on its visitors. While her heart battles with her mind, Margaret begins to consider new possibilities for Clara and for herself as their sojourn in Florence becomes a life-changing journey, both bittersweet and hopeful," state notes.
 
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Miami Herald

CINCINNATI - In this hilly Ohio city in early autumn, on the stage of a grand performing arts center dreamed up by Cesar Pelli, a handsome Italian man and a childlike American woman yield to the passion of love at first sight.

On Tuesday, Miami gets its own chance to surrender, both to the lush romanticism of the Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza and to the rush of being the very first paying crowd in the Pelli-designed Carnival Center for the Performing Arts.

The $446.3 million center officially opens with a starry, four-day celebration beginning Oct. 5. But if a theater begins to live only when the artist-audience connection is complete, then Tuesday marks both the culmination of the years-long struggle to get the Carnival Center built and the beginning of a new era in South Florida arts.
 
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San Francisco Chronicle

Adam Guettel's predominant reaction was relief.

"I had my neck on the block," says Guettel, Tony award-winning composer of "The Light in the Piazza," the rhapsodic musical that begins its first national tour in San Francisco this week.

"I really, really wanted to make my mark," Guettel admits. "A lot of my personal problems were enormously related to that, and to that sense of, how can I make it up this mountain?"
 
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