Beauty or Brains? A Simple Equation
The main character of the musical The Light in the Piazza is named Clara. She’s blonde. The show is set in the fifties, and she wears gorgeous fit-and-flare dresses. The waists are belted tight and the wide skirts swirl. She’s beautiful. Her tastes are simple—she likes sunlight, hugs, the thought of having a baby one day. Her story goes like this: she and her mother are visiting Italy from North Carolina when they meet a handsome young man named Fabrizio. He and Clara fall in love at first sight. The initial obstacle to their romance is that they don’t speak the same language; the later, and more serious, is that in Clara’s mother’s eyes, Clara is not ready to enter any relationship, as Clara was kicked in the head by a horse at her twelfth birthday party and has remained childlike ever since. But neither of those things matters in the end. Clara’s beauty reflects her essence—her face reveals, at a glance, her pure heart and innocent spirit. What unites the American girl and Italian boy isn’t a shared culture or IQ, but the quality they sing out in their love duet: “You are good, you are good, you are good …”
I watched them sing to each other in a Manhattan theater
