“The Last Romance,” opening at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota July 22, comes from playwright Joe DiPietro. With two Tonys, a Drama Desk and three Outer Critics Circle Awards, DiPietro has built a reputation for smart, evocative writing.
Executive Director Rebecca Hopkins says she saw “The Last Romance” years ago and loved it.
“It’s a really sweet play,” she said.
More bittersweet than sweet, actually, especially for anyone who comes from a traditional Italian family.
“A man meets a woman in a dog park and he keeps going back to the dog park to see her. They are senior citizens. They fall in love and it's their love story,” Hopkins summarized.
Hopkins thinks the play is inspirational, if not aspirational.
“Just because you retire doesn't mean everything ends. You can need a second chance at any point in life. It gives everybody hope that you still can fall in love and you can still have relationships and you can do all this stuff,” Hopkins observed.
And, says Hopkins, DiPietro tells the tale with an abundance of humor.
“It's funny as all get out. Joe DiPietro is very funny writer.”
“The Last Romance” is at Florida Studio Theatre July 22 through Aug. 16.
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“The Last Romance” is the third and final FST main stage summer production.
“It's all about strangers meeting each other and providing support to each other and how important relationships really are,” Hopkins added. “So I'm really excited about this summer season because of that. We could all use a little more nice.”
Synopsis
“The Last Romance” is a heart-warming comedy about the transformative power of love.
A crush can make anyone feel young again – even a widower named Ralph. On an ordinary day in a routine life, Ralph decides to take a different path on his daily walk. It serendipitously leads him to an unexpected second chance at love.
Relying on a renewed boyish charm, Ralph attempts to woo an elegant, but distant, seventy-something woman by the name of Carol. Defying Carol's reticence – and his lonely sister's jealousy – Ralph embarks on the trip of a lifetime.
DiPietro sets his play in Hoboken, New Jersey, a small city known for Italian crooner Frank Sinatra and dockside thugs, for its cultural remoteness from the glittering metropolis across the river, and for its tightly knit ethnic communities. DiPietro is clearly tapping into ideas and images that support the themes of his drama.
The play is built around Ralph Bellini’s pursuit of romance and his quest to escape the constricting life he leads as a widower sharing a small apartment with his sister, Ruth, whose husband left her years ago.
Having once auditioned at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan, Ralph yearns to resurrect some of the grand passions he once imagined performing onstage in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” While that never happened, he was able to attend a handful of performances at the Metropolitan Opera with his late wife, where he was able to vicariously experience those passions. But those trips to the opera now lie long in the past.
In contrast to the world he imagined, Ralph’s reality is a defined by the hemmed-in parks and stuffy apartments of his unglamorous hometown and constrained by his stifling relationship with his sister. Like DiPietro’s “Over the River and through the Woods,” “The Last Romance" shows us characters struggling with the conflicts created by the competing claims of family responsibility and self fulfillment.
Themes
This play is deeply unsettling – in the best theatrical tradition.
While second chances and redemption are as part of Americana as apple pie a’ la mode, not everyone has the capacity to take advantage of a second chance when it comes along. That’s true of Ralph Bellini, who has dreamed for more than six decades of traveling to Milan to see an opera at La Scala but – spoiler alert – he allows his perceived obligations to his sister to derail that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – and along with it, his last chance for romance albeit at the age of 80.
The conflict between being true to yourself and conforming to family or societal expectations is a theme revisited by numerous plays and musicals. Equally universal is the realization that not every family places the happiness of children or siblings first and foremost. Some have preconceived notions about duty and responsibility that they thrust on family members even though it may mean stifling their hopes and dreams for an artistically fulfilling life.
Audience members will reach divergent conclusions about Ralph’s decision. But any ethnicity in which guilt is strategically employed as a motivational driver, arguably such as with Italians, will readily understand while simultaneously abhorring the decision Ralph makes at the conclusion of the play. At the same time, people will feel differently about the choice Carol makes based, in her case, on their personal convictions about morality and duty.
Like Rebecca Hopkins, most critics choose to focus on the play’s positive message that love and joy remain within our grasp no matter our age or station in life and perhaps the joy that Ralph and his sister, Rose, will find in a more loving bond as brother and sister has rewards that rival those of romance. However, whether you choose to embrace the positive or are haunted by the specter of love lost and the road not taken may very well come down to whether you had the pleasure – or misfortune – of being raised in a traditional Italian family in a suburb of Manhattan, in a close-knit ethnic neighborhood in Hoboken or Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
About the operas
In “The Last Romance,” the playwright employs a fascinating theatrical device. Each scene in acts one and two are introduced by a young opera singer who either is or represents Ralph Bellini as a young opera enthusiast.
For example, in act one, scene one, the young man sings a verse in Italian from the song, “Mattinata” by Ruggero Leoncavallo, a composer best known for his opera, “Pagliacci.”
In scene two of act one, he sings an aria from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” an opera about the famous seducer, Don Juan.
That’s followed by an aria from Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” That opera tells the story of a clown with a cheating wife who must force himself to make others laugh despite his broken heart. But the aria performed by the young opera singer is instead that of Silvio, the man who seduces the clown’s wife:
Why, if you must leave me without pity,
why then, sorceress, have you ensnared me?
Why then did you kiss me
in the abandon of your close embrace?
If you forget those fleeting hours,
I cannot do so: I desire still
that warm abandon and that flaming kiss
that kindled such a fire in my blood!
For the first scene in act two, DiPietro chose “Herodiade,” an opera by French composer Massenet about Herod, Salome, and John the Baptist. In this instance, the young man sings Herod’s aria about his longing for Salome:
O, vision. Ever fleeing; ever pursued.
Ah! It is you I long to see,
O my love!
O my hope!
You have taken possession of my life.
In act two, scene three, it’s the “Diamond Song” from Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” based on three fantastic short stories by the German author, E.T.A. Hoffmann, followed in scene four by the aria from Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte,” a comic opera about faithless lovers that comments on the fickleness of women.
Each opera introduces and underscores the emotions Ralph experiences as he meets, pursues and falls in love with Carol. It’s a brilliant device that marries the significance and passion of opera in Ralph’s life to the action unfolding onstage or, more accurately, in the Hoboken dog run where the play takes place.
About the playwright
Joe DiPietro is known for his Broadway shows “Diana” (also on Netflix), “Nice Work If You Can Get It” starring Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara (10 Tony nominations, including Best Book and Best Musical), “Memphis” (four Tony Awards, including Best Book, Best Score and Best Musical), “All Shook Up,” “Living on Love” (starring Renee Fleming).
Among his shows that have been produced Off-Broadway are “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” (Off-Broadway Alliance Award - Best Musical), “Clever Little Lies” (starring Marlo Thomas), “The Toxic Avenger” (OCC Award - Best off-Broadway Musical), “The Thing About Men” (OCC Award - Best off-Broadway Musical), the much-produced comedy, “Over the River and Through the Woods,” as well “I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change” (the longest-running musical revue in Off-Broadway history).
His many regional credits include “Conscience” (George Street Playhouse), “The Second Mrs. Wilson” (Long Wharf Theatre), “Chasing the Song” (La Jolla Playhouse) and “The Last Romance” (The Old Globe.)
His musicals and plays have received thousands of productions across the country and around the world.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
