Feb. 2nd, 2014 09:03 pm
La Cavatina di Buggs
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muckefuckWe have a surprising number of opening nights in our subscription this year, and last night was one of them, so I'm feeling even more pressure than usual to post a review of Lyric's Barbiere. People were dressed up, too. Not me! I dressed for the weather. In fact, I even broke one of my own stuffy rules and wore jeans for a change. They came in handy when I arrived a full forty-five minutes early to dinner and killed the time by taking a stroll up through Montgomery Ward Park and back.
To cut to the chase: We all loved it. Good conducting, good singing, good acting, good (new) production. No one in our troika had a problem with any of the staging but me. Our seat neighbour shared my reservations about the tenor, but these were minor. It's lively, colourful, and fun. If you're not sure whether you'd like opera or not, this would be a good one to take a test ride on. (I told one of my coworker's what I was seeing and his reaction was, "Oh, the Buggs Bunny one?" When I relayed this to Nuphy, he said, "Looks like Buggs had a role in the staging!")
So, details. The only ringers in the cast as far as we were concerned going in were Nathan "Where's My Shirt?" Gunn and veteran Italian comic baritone Alessandro Corbelli. Of the other principles, only Isabel Leonard was making her Lyric debut, but I didn't remember the others impressing me as much as they did this time around. Alek Shrader, our Almaviva, is still a bit green. He needed to warm up and I was struggling to express what I didn't like about his vibrato until Neighbour summed it up as "his timbre is inconsistent". Nothing that can't be fixed with more practice, and he has a lovely tone, which can't be acquired by any means short of seeing an undersea sorceress. Kyle Ketelsen boomed as Basilio and had a great physical presence, too. But the standout singer was definitely Leonard. Opera in general--but particularly bel canto opera--is about making hard work sound effortless, and she does it. Everyone's acting was good; nobody stayed in place and you never had any doubt what anyone was up to.
It was a simple set, but a lovely one. I had a problem with the lighting, which was too garish at times. (Yeah, the action is cartoonish, but that doesn't mean you should make it look like a colourist slopped ink everywhere.) I would say it was artful the way they repurposed the courtyard set for the interior scenes if this hadn't been done by means of an ostentatious set change in full view with no accompaniment. This also brought in a centre stage pool which was poorly designed and had difficulty justifying its presence. It also brought on a cadre of...well, I'm not sure what they were, and that's where I have trouble with the staging.
When you first see a large group of people in trim costumes entring under the cover of semidarkness, the obvious assumption is that they're stagehands. Even if they're posturing themselves stiffly as part of some choreographed set change, they're still stagehands. But when they reentre bearing furniture after Rosina's made her entrance, she gazes over the room and seems to take notice of them. Wait, are they servants after all? They must be because Bartolo gives them orders later. But he only seems to ever address a couple of them while ignoring the rest. So are some of them visible to the characters and others not? Then why are they all costumed the same? As I say above, none of this confusion bothered my seat partners in the least, but there's postmodernism and then there's just sloppy stage direction. I saw nothing to convinced me this was the former rather than the latter.
But the minions are all but absent from Act II, so there's nothing to interfere with the enjoyment as we hop from one ludicrous plot point to another. And since it was another Davis-free evening (how I treasure them!), Mariotti, our young Italian conductor, kept the orchestra hopping along with them. The only misstep was a shockingly flubbed oboe solo in the overture. I guess even professionals get opening-night jitters.
To cut to the chase: We all loved it. Good conducting, good singing, good acting, good (new) production. No one in our troika had a problem with any of the staging but me. Our seat neighbour shared my reservations about the tenor, but these were minor. It's lively, colourful, and fun. If you're not sure whether you'd like opera or not, this would be a good one to take a test ride on. (I told one of my coworker's what I was seeing and his reaction was, "Oh, the Buggs Bunny one?" When I relayed this to Nuphy, he said, "Looks like Buggs had a role in the staging!")
So, details. The only ringers in the cast as far as we were concerned going in were Nathan "Where's My Shirt?" Gunn and veteran Italian comic baritone Alessandro Corbelli. Of the other principles, only Isabel Leonard was making her Lyric debut, but I didn't remember the others impressing me as much as they did this time around. Alek Shrader, our Almaviva, is still a bit green. He needed to warm up and I was struggling to express what I didn't like about his vibrato until Neighbour summed it up as "his timbre is inconsistent". Nothing that can't be fixed with more practice, and he has a lovely tone, which can't be acquired by any means short of seeing an undersea sorceress. Kyle Ketelsen boomed as Basilio and had a great physical presence, too. But the standout singer was definitely Leonard. Opera in general--but particularly bel canto opera--is about making hard work sound effortless, and she does it. Everyone's acting was good; nobody stayed in place and you never had any doubt what anyone was up to.
It was a simple set, but a lovely one. I had a problem with the lighting, which was too garish at times. (Yeah, the action is cartoonish, but that doesn't mean you should make it look like a colourist slopped ink everywhere.) I would say it was artful the way they repurposed the courtyard set for the interior scenes if this hadn't been done by means of an ostentatious set change in full view with no accompaniment. This also brought in a centre stage pool which was poorly designed and had difficulty justifying its presence. It also brought on a cadre of...well, I'm not sure what they were, and that's where I have trouble with the staging.
When you first see a large group of people in trim costumes entring under the cover of semidarkness, the obvious assumption is that they're stagehands. Even if they're posturing themselves stiffly as part of some choreographed set change, they're still stagehands. But when they reentre bearing furniture after Rosina's made her entrance, she gazes over the room and seems to take notice of them. Wait, are they servants after all? They must be because Bartolo gives them orders later. But he only seems to ever address a couple of them while ignoring the rest. So are some of them visible to the characters and others not? Then why are they all costumed the same? As I say above, none of this confusion bothered my seat partners in the least, but there's postmodernism and then there's just sloppy stage direction. I saw nothing to convinced me this was the former rather than the latter.
But the minions are all but absent from Act II, so there's nothing to interfere with the enjoyment as we hop from one ludicrous plot point to another. And since it was another Davis-free evening (how I treasure them!), Mariotti, our young Italian conductor, kept the orchestra hopping along with them. The only misstep was a shockingly flubbed oboe solo in the overture. I guess even professionals get opening-night jitters.