TT: Songs of themselves

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column features three musicals, one on Broadway and two out of town: [title of show], a Vermont production of The Light in the Piazza, and an Oklahoma! in upstate New York. Here’s an excerpt.
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The ultimate backstage musical–and I don’t mean that as a compliment–has come to Broadway. “[title of show]” is a show about itself, a 90-minute mini-musical whose authors, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, play themselves and whose subject is how the show in which they are appearing came to be written and produced. If all this sounds claustrophobically self-indulgent, there’s a reason: I don’t know when I’ve seen a musical that seemed more pleased with itself.
Art about art usually is self-indulgent, but it doesn’t have to be–so long as its self-reflexiveness has wider implications. The first two-thirds of “[title of show]” fails to pass that test. It basically amounts to one long inside joke about theater, a daisy chain of glib references to moldy Broadway flops (anybody who can remember “Censored Scenes from King Kong” needs to run right out and get a life) and stale postmodern gimmickry (it is not clever to shout “Key change!” when the song you’re singing changes keys). A full hour crawls by before “[title of show]” cuts out the coyness and gets serious….
Everything missing from “[title of show]” is present in abundance in Adam Guettel’s “The Light in the Piazza,” which has just been revived by the Weston Playhouse Theatre Company in a brand-new chamber version for eight actors and five musicians. (The original version calls for 18 actors and 15 musicians.) Mr. Guettel has shrunk the show’s scale without diminishing its passionate romanticism–if anything, it plays better this way–and I won’t be at all surprised if the new “Piazza” becomes the standard performing version of the first great musical of the post-Sondheim era.
It helps, of course, that this intimate production, directed with intelligence and grace by Steve Stettler, is so very fine. In certain ways Mr. Stettler’s “Piazza” is actually superior to Lincoln Center Theater’s 2005 Broadway production…
Richard Rodgers, Mr. Guettel’s grandfather, was a pretty fair tunesmith himself, and many of his shows profit from the same intimate treatment that the Weston Playhouse is giving to “The Light in the Piazza.” I’m not altogether sure that “Oklahoma!” is one of them, but the Hangar Theatre’s small-scale revival of the most enduringly popular of the five hit musicals that Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II is still an unpretentiously likable piece of work….
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Read the whole thing here.