About the Design
A scenic concept for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s The Light in the Piazza — the story of an American mother and daughter travelling through 1953 Florence, where the daughter falls into an unexpected love affair against a backdrop of Italian Renaissance architecture, statuary, and the slow gold of Tuscan afternoon light.
The design works as a modular Italianate kit: a three-bay arcade of Ionic columns with oculus piercings sits over a curved cyclorama, and the unit reconfigures — statue swaps, drapery flies in, side fragments track on and off — to carry the show through piazza, café, bookshop, hotel interior, and the intimate two-handers between Clara and Margaret.
Design Process
The design progressed from initial concept sketches in Vectorworks — rough block-outs testing how the modular colonnade, furniture, and soft-goods configurations shift the emotional register scene by scene — through to fully rendered visualisations with ground plans documenting the final scenic package.
Initial Concept Sketches
Early Vectorworks block-outs exploring how the modular architecture absorbs six distinct environments.
Renderings & Ground Plans
Final scenic renderings paired with dimensioned ground plans — each plate documents a scene configuration through the show.
