The Light in the Piazza

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My next series of cocktails was for a show my wife produced and performed in a year ago, The Light in the Piazza. She fell in love with this Tony award-winning show a few years ago and was anxiously awaiting a theater to produce it so she might be in it. After waiting a while and never seeing it appear in any season she began shopping the idea around to multiple local theaters, but none bit. It wouldn’t sell, they said. So she took on the project of starting her own theater company and producing it herself, a Herculean effort which she not only pulled off (the show was wonderful), but did so to great response AND she made money without having any name recognition or subscriber base (wouldn’t sell, they said…).

My job was mostly not taking on any shows myself and watching our kids. I did contribute support through some graphics work, including the design of the company logo and the poster for the show, which you can see above. To achieve this I found an interactive panorama of the piazza from the show (the Piazza della Signoria) and adjusted it to what I felt was a dynamic angle. I then captured the image and took it into Illustrator, where I traced it out and made some adjustments to better fit my composition.

The bands of light are an obvious nod to the title of the piece, and the hat is an image from the show, where the wind takes the character of Clara’s hat off her head and into the hands of the man she falls in love with. I liked the way the blue popped against the rosey colors of the lights.

The fonts and text character arrangement probably take me just as long if not longer than the other graphic images, but I was happy with the title in the end, and felt it was appropriate for the piece.

Of course, my other job was conceiving some cocktails, which I did for some online publicity and presented at the cast party. I was going to start with three — one for each location in the musical (Florence, Rome and Winston-Salem, North Carolina) — but in the end crafted five, with one more by request and another an inspiration from a bottle I found.

It’s the first series of cocktails I made for a show I wasn’t in. There are a lot of shows I’m not in. I’m not sure this is a good or bad precedent…

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