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For Broadway People

 Adam Guettel is in the news because his dead mother, Mary Rodgers, has released a memoir. Also, Guettel's "Light in the Piazza" will come back to New York City in a few months; this will be a big deal.


Guettel has written two classic "show closers." Both occur in shows that don't really work. The first is the end of "Floyd Collins" -- a song called "How Glory Goes." A man is trapped in a cave; he knows he is going to die. He tries to imagine the afterlife:

Will my mama be there, waiting for me?
Smiling like the way she does, and holding out her arms?
As she calls my name.....?

He wonders if life's irritations will follow him into heaven:

Will I want, will I wish for all the things I should have done--
Longing to finish what I've only just begun?

Nothing is resolved, and in the song's final moments, Floyd does something startling. He begins to yodel; we have known, all evening, that he enjoys yodeling. He used to do this with his brother. Now, he is alone, and his voice bounces off the walls of the cave he is entombed in; he is in a dialogue with himself. The cliche about poetry is that "it grows out of an argument you have with your own soul" -- and Adam Guettel found a way to capture this idea on-stage.

Similarly, "Light in the Piazza" ends with a woman drowning in ambivalence. She has to surrender her vulnerable, damaged daughter to a young man; she has to do this even when her own experience of love has been disastrous. Her bitterness pops out:

Love's a fake.
Love's a fable.
Just a painting, on a ceiling....
Just a children's fairy tale.....

But, also, she knows that her daughter needs to make her own mistakes and have her own life:

If you find in the world,
In the wide, wide world,
That someone sees--
That someone knows you--
Love.
Love.
Love if you can now, my Clara;
Love if you can, and be loved.....
May it last forever....

I'm not crazy about Guettel's work, generally, but I'm crazy about these two songs. I wish he'd get something new up on a Broadway stage, in the near future.

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