From the first step Margaret Anne Florence takes into our Piazza, in a delicious Limoncello yellow dress, her refreshing childlike eagerness in tow, she deftly captures our attention and wrestles control of it and never lets go.

Miss Florence’s interpretation of Clara Johnson possesses a jovial and doe-eyed wonder that reminds us of the similarly confected Natalie Wood as Deanie Loomis, in William Inge’s torn-lover saga, Splendor In The Grass.

Florence is a creature of loveliness, fecund with music and theatrical chops, her character resides within a mildly shadowed world inside the glass bubble her mother has created to shelter her from the harsh light of reality while she nonetheless leaps and frolics about without the slightest self-awareness.

Clara is a young, exuberant American, being guided, albeit a bit too gingerly, throughout Italy, by her mother, Margaret Johnson (played here with a heart-wrenching and bittersweet conviction by Hollis Resnick) her sole protector against intruders and other potential worldly dangers she apparently presages around every corner.

While there is much of Tennessee William’s Amanda Wingfield and her neurosis (The Glass Menagerie) in this mother/daughter duo, the dynamics are more vivacious and contrary to Amanda Wingfield’s desperation to wed her daughter off, Margaret Johnson’s mission is the complete opposite, led by an unshakable determination to keep the specter of manhood far from the reaches of her daughter’s frail spirit.

For you see, Clara is a wild butterfly, truly broken free of the pupae, whereas Laura Wingfield was always and forever doomed to abject solitude, lost in the inner realm of her repressed womanhood, lack of self-confidence and far more fragile and breakable from the comparative asphyxia Amanda Wingfield sentences her too than Clara could ever be. Clara bears no cross of self-confidence and is quite ready to fully flavor the adventure of romance beyond guffawing at Michelangelo’s David’s exposed penis in the play's opening scene.

Margaret Johnson, hypersensitive to her daughter’s naïve character over-protects her little broken-winged sparrow (we are to learn in layers of revelation that Clara harbors a permanent flaw) with a mother’s preternatural anxiety and foreboding. However, she is determined to allow her daughter to stretch her wings just wide enough for her to get a sense of life’s better offerings.

Their first number is a raucously happy and delightful song celebrating their shared excitement of discovery; “In Firenze” deftly establishes the vocal gifts of both actresses while they invite us further into the palpable immediacy of their relationship.

No time to linger in the Piazza however and we notice another angelic apparition sauntering among the townsfolk. The character in question is a young man, aided by La Forza del Destino, on cue in the theatrical form of a gust of wind, that wafts Clara’s hat as if by magic carpet directly into his predestined hands, the tremulous hands of our play’s hero, Fabrizio Naccarelli.

Fabrizio, who upon sighting Clara in the piazza, falls promptly, unquestionably, irrevocably and deeply in love with the refreshing birdlike Clara, waxing a wide-eyed wonder that swallows the Piazza whole with her aura.

A proverbial Italian stallion, played here with a provocative ambivalence by Nicholas Rodriguez, we anxiously sympathize with Fabrizio’s frantic sentimental pendulum swinging between his classical Catholic upbringing and its attendant and proper rules of wooing, alongside the equally powerful draw of his native Italian sexuality, charged by genetic demands that prod him ever closer to Clara.

Lathered in a swank and smooth palette of crème brûllées by Linda J. Cho’s accurate and almost palatable period costuming, we devour Fabrizio, who dons a pair of unquestionable leading man pants, that amorously climb his thighs like a swathe of tiramisu blending imperceptibly into a café au lait knit top. That creamy, dreamy top, happily hugs his torso, defining every nuanced shift of his tentative impulse to pounce. Rodriguez is crowned by perfectly coiffed, deep coffee brown locks, cut precisely to frame his ear-to-ear grin, formed by that seductive and ardent mouth that is forever expressing his feverish desire and the smothered, smoldering, sensual ardor that beats just beneath that coffee-knit shirt, a mile a minute.

Rodriguez embodies his heart stung character faithfully and is utterly convincing in his complete devotion and determination to win over Clara’s heart. No mere eye candy, Rodriguez too possesses an arsenal of performance mettle that stands the test of this demanding role. He never once drops character nor loses touch with his mad passion for his translucent and other-worldly Clara. In spite of the over the top obsession of being madly in love for the first time, he doesn’t slip into the facile nor the farcically comedic pitfalls that can easily be a trap for material this potentially sacharrine. There exists something of Jacques Perrin’s Salvatore, from the film “Cinema Paradiso” in both Mr. Rodriguez's physicality and his dashing good looks.  But again, regardless of the similarities to the ageless lovers aching on the boards, Rodriguez’s Fabrizio stands out as a laudable accomplishment for this fine young actor.

Fabrizio circles his Clara like a tiger from the trees, with his effortless swagger, all awash in his dimples and deferred sexual hunger.   Not quite a Brando, but definitely a masculine force to be reckoned with. I was truly convinced that there was some kind of backstage romance afoot as the electricity between these two is enough to light a small town in the mid-west for a good week’s worth of power. Only later was I informed that Ms. Florence is happily wed and our Fabrizio's hot cauldrons are happily stirred at home with his own other half.  

Our theatrical lovers meet. Chemistry sparks from the first instant their eyes connect. The stage has been set aflame to recount again on behalf of the eternal Romeos and Juliets of the world, our ladies and their tramps, the endless variations of boy meets girl, a story of two such creatures battling the foilbles of their condition. 

Anne Patterson’s Set Design has managed to accommodate a wide array of action within the temporary limitations at Arena’s Crystal City Restaged location. Quite a feat! The play cries for a roomier space to indulge its sweeping emotional arcs and flourishes and one can’t but be excited in knowing that in short order such will be the new world order Arena will christen for itself this fall.

Director Molly Smith has used her players wisely and managed to maintain a fluidity of dance and motion that successfully conquers the spaces limitations and orchestrates a continual dramatic flow within the story and never allows us to feel the claustrophobia of the space nor the director’s hand.

The visual projections by Adam Larsen lend a romantic air to the shifting scenes otherwise left flat by the monochromatic coloring of the set by Anne Patterson, a Monastery-like series of arches and a series of steps that lead up to a small balcony from where the play’s lyrical and poetic music descends from their angelic orders.

The music keeping these young febrile singers good company is delivered by a mere five instruments decending the innocuous clouds above the Piazza, led deftly by the hand of Paul Sportelli, the play's Musical Director.

Arriving home with his freshly pierced heart, arrow dangling from his chest, quivering and dancing with his realization of being full-tilt boogie head over heels in love with Clara, Fabrizio interrupts the daily grind at his father’s haberdashery with his gaping heart in full throttle song.  He enlists his father and brother to help him conquer his adored one, by getting some finer garments (as if Cho’s luxurious cladding had not sufficed!) that he might be worthy of one as refined as Clara seems. They perform the transformation in a fantastically humorous number and one of my favorites in the show, wherein his father and brother take pity on him and dress the afflicted one.

The brother, Giuseppe, half-mocks his lovelorn brother and twirls him about in different attire until the effect is just right. I can’t but help but reference these images once more to movies as the events on stage seemed to invite within me a  happy frolic into the chambers of my sizeable motion picture vaults of memory. 

In this particular merry song and dance, Giuseppe, played by Jonathan Raviv, exhibits the kind of fun physical comedy of one of America’s great beloveds, Jack Lemmon. Something about this number reminded me of Billy Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot” in its madcap and playful antics. Choreographer Parker Esse has delivered a playful and at times very touching orchestration of physical language that raises the affair of movement and dance to heavenly orders.

Another source of preparation for his gentlemanly rehearsals is the spectacular and pulse capturing presence of Ariela Maija Morgenstern’s embodiment of Italian womanhood at its most sizzling in the role of Franca. Morgenstern is just too hot to handle swerving her fiery hips atop some serious stilettos, she commands the stage once she opens her sensuous and luscious crimson lips.  Indeed, A qualcuno piace caldo!

What ensues is predictable, but never boring. Other supporting characters of note are Fabrizio’s father (Ken Krugman as Signor Naccarelli) and his mother (Mary Gutzi as Signora Naccarelli) who both add many comedic, tender and parental qualities to the drama that deserve noting, especially Ms. Gutzi’s funnier bits as the matriarch of her beloved family anguishing as Margaret also does for Clara, over the happiness of their greatest treasures.

In the end, in spite of all the other glowing performances, I felt the night belonged to Hollis Resnick as Margaret Johnson.   Her performance (Please God forgive my celluloid memories!) echoed so lovingly, aspects of some of the greatest dames of the theatre...ahem..and film...while wholly an original and not intentionally crafted to resemble anyone I would imagine, I could feel the kinship Ms. Hollis has to one as ethereal in her earthly delivery as Vivien Leigh was, had she been able to summon a voice as sublime and nuanced as Ms. Hollis' is.   In moments I felt also there was something of the delicate majesty of Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth (yes, the movie!) wherein a fallen movie star grapples with the fading of her career.  We so often lament, where are the new greats?  Where are the larger than life actors that once were so ubiquitous in our theatre and...ahem...our films.  Well, I think perhaps Arena has been keeping them in a private wine cellar, maturing and growing in flavor and divinity with the passing of time.  I hope to see more of Ms. Resnick in short order.

By the end of the evening (for those of you who are as of yet uninitiated, I will keep the ending a secret) we are revived, refreshed, renewed. Just as the Spring that  threatens to burst out in full color and natural harmony among us, so too have we been delivered, at the hands of Molly Smith’s enamored directing, a real classic tale of love, adorned with such inner color, such lovely and soul inspiring music and an infinite variation of luminescence and talent to people the play with.

Our Snowmaggedon is over. Spring is just around the corner. The daffodils are straining to reach the sun. And for the moment, until the real thing comes along in the fall for all Arena devotees, let us snuggle into the intimate space that has allowed us to continue to enjoy the assembled creative talents of the Arena Production machine and all the invited artists who have informed our spiritual happiness and glee.

So head out of the house, dust off the cobwebs of overwintering spiders, rake off the doldrums of our dour economy, thaw away from the entrenched stale mate of our politicians and come get take harbor and warmth in the glow of Arena’s temporary home in Crystal City. We are nearing the bend in the road, and soon enough, real klieg lights will reveal a future for Washington’s theatrical scene, unlike anything we’ve seen before!  Kudos Arena.