Try to Watch Everything Here

Good work, Megan Moore and Duke Kim!  Incredible show there, Sean Michael Plumb, you are the perfect Figaro. Ashraf Sewailam and William Guanbo Su, knockout stuff.

And you, too, Deanne Meek, although I did not know there was a maid named Berta in the Barber of Seville, since I’ve only seen it two or three times before.

Perfection, conductor Valentina Peleggi.

But the thing that kicked this one way over the top was the production and staging, so let’s try to figure out who Tracy Grant Lord is, and how she did this. Important too, she did it with Daniel Pelzig and Matthew Marshall on the choreography and lighting.

Here is a Barber that has something extra going on, all the time, and you hardly know which part of the stage to watch for the next crazy action. You have the active lights, you have the windows and doors in action, you have people doing things upstairs and behind the scenery, that you can barely see, but watch out, because something is going to happen over there.

Of course you start with my favorite overture, and in this case it is played flawlessly by Peleggi and the crew. (It’s the one that alerted me to Rossini when I was 15.)  I wanted to close my eyes and take it in, but wait! No! Watch the stage while the melodies set up the mood. There’s a multi-story array of colorful doors and windows that we have not seen since New York put a small city onstage for Damnation of Faust in 2008.

And a freestanding proscenium arch, if I am not mistaken, built out of more windows and doors, framing it up from the front. And the lights start glowing, and shifting, and building, coordinated to match the music, not to distract. Who thought of this?  This is great!

This thing moves fast. Nobody just stands and sings; they duck out through a door and hurry back in through another. They leave on the ground floor and then enter through an upstairs window. By the end, they’ve got the large cast and bigger chorus circulating around in a ridiculous circus, as the crazy plot builds up and explodes. Woof.

Another staging in which they don’t bring down the curtain, except at intermission. The little doors and windows are outside on the street with Figaro ready to solve all the problems in Seville, and then when they push in a few sofas, it’s an atrium living room where old Bartolo is hot after Rosina. Keeps it moving; nice work.

Can It Be Funnier Than Cenerentola?

Barber is the only romantic tale I know of, in which the guy sets up below the balcony window and serenades his heart out, and then his gal never wakes up to open the window. Clever stuff, Rossini and Sterbini; nobody home, just call it off. But in this production, the little band of musicians, driven by Pelzig, I imagine, is an actual comedy troupe. This gang is funny.

Then we have spotlights in the audience, the stage manager popping out with his clipboard and headphones, and manic Figaro tearing in from the back door.

Who the hell is Ambrogio the servant?  Does he even sing?  Well, in this show, he’s a key character, pumping up the humor, and ultimately marrying Berta the maid. Rossini never thought of that.

This production’s a laugh riot, incredibly pushing Barber past even Cenerentola as the funniest opera on stage.

And on it goes, and you can see someone called Waxie Moon hamming it up as the servant Ambrogio from the beginning to the end, including the sideshow where he’s drawn skyward by the chandelier. The lights fail, and they do the flashlight-face trick, funnier than at summer camp. La Calunnia, the masterpiece song promoting slander as a weapon is done perfectly, at least by this extremely good cast.

What’s going on here is not just an opera, but a comedy play, because the entire cast appears to be skilled actors and visual comedians. Too bad this was the closing performance in Seattle, because this is an opportunity to get other people to go see it, and learn that operas are not always about sad lovers dying. This one is really funny!

Figaro and the Almavivas

After Rossini offered his run of several not-so-funny farsa comicas for Venice, he spent 1813-15 trying his hand at serious operas, and all six of those are pretty hard to find onstage this century. But he took a fun break midstream in that with Il Turco in Italia, which is both funny and masterfully musical, and then in 1816 here he comes with Barber of Seville, with La Cenerentola a year after that. These, along with his final comedy (Comte Ory) are the ones that firmed up Rossini’s reputation as the master of comic opera in the Bel Canto era.

The trivia bit that is fun to know is that the story of Barber is a play by Pierre Beaumarchais from the late 1700s, and before Rossini, at least three other composers had written this up as operas. Beaumarchais wrote three related plays, each about Figaro, the Count, and the Countess (Rosina). Barber is the first of the three, and the second was used by Mozart to tell about Figaro’s marriage.

After a long wait, the third play, called The Guilty Mother, was presented as a French opera in 1966 by Darius Milhaud. (It explains how Cherubino finally succeeds with the Countess in the bedroom, and the family situation gets absurdly out of control.) Neither the play nor the opera is a huge hit.

Who is Tracy Grant Lord?

She’s from New Zealand, and mostly she handles ballets and regular stage dramas, along with a couple of Verdi operas in Australia. Her first North American opera was Barber of Seville in Seattle, but that was back in 2017. They call her a set and costume designer, and a scenographer.

Awards and accolades, and that’s about all we can learn.

Heads up!  Des Moines Metro Opera is putting on this same show in June and July, 2024. (And Kim, Sewailam, and Waxie – his other name is Marc Kenison – are flying in, to reprise.)  Don’t miss this one.

Somewhere there is a Marriage of Figaro production that she designed for New Zealand, and I would like to see that. Also, an Orpheus and Eurydice which will be interesting to those who like that story more than I do.

Or, you can see her setting of The Nutcracker in Tulsa in December, and that’s it. You want more, you go to New Zealand.

But that sad (and monotonous) New York Forza del Destino sure could have used some wacky hijinks and a few sight gags to liven it up. Suggestion there, Tracy. Just saying.