Living on Love (Williamstown)
Opening Night: July 16, 2014
Closing: July 26, 2014
Theater: Williamstown Theatre Festival
World-renowned soprano Renée Fleming takes the Festival stage as celebrated diva Raquel De Angelis. When her husband, the fiery and egomaniacal Maestro Vito De Angelis, becomes enamored with the lovely young lady hired to ghostwrite his long-delayed autobiography, Raquel retaliates by hiring her very own — and very handsome — ghostwriter to chronicle her life as an opera star. As the young writers try to keep themselves out of the story while churning out chapters, the high-energy — and high-maintenance — power duet threatens to fall out of tune for good. A sparkling new comedy from two-time Tony Award winner Joe DiPietro, adapted from a work by the revered Garson Kanin and directed by three-time Tony Award winner Kathleen Marshall.
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July 20, 2014
When Renée Fleming tweets, she doesn’t confine herself to 140 characters. In the second act of Living on Love, a fun and flimsy entertainment at the Williamstown Theater Festival here, she glides into the room warbling sweetly. “Did I just hear the birds singing?” she asks. Then she looses several more soaring notes. “Oh no,” she says, as if surprised, “that was me.” Ms. Fleming, a renowned soprano in her first role in a play, portrays Raquel, an opera diva whose career is crashing. Raquel frets over her declining powers. “How soon till age renders your instrument unexceptional?” she asks herself. “When will you become a mezzo?” Ms. Fleming pronounces the word “mezzo” in the sort of horrified whisper that most people reserve for “cancer” or “syphilis.” The playwright Joe DiPietro and the director Kathleen Marshall, who worked together on the Broadway musical Nice Work If You Can Get It, have reteamed for this screwball showbiz comedy, an update of Garson Kanin’s 1985 play Peccadillo.
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