Director’s Note
The Barber of Seville is based on a French play by Beaumarchais who explored how the stock characters of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte evolved when they came to France. We still find the miserly old man, the arrogant soldier, the athletic servant, the heady doctor who lectures in Latin, and of course, the young upper-class lovers. The upper-class masters are educated but lack life skills, and the lower-class servants are uneducated but cunning. It usually takes the street smarts of the servants to help the educated young lovers overcome the obstacles presented by the older generation to win love.
By the early 19th century, the French Boulevard Theatres had adopted not only these Commedia characters but many of the stock scenarios like a woman locked in a tower being serenaded by her lover, or the many disguises and mistaken identities employed to work out the obstacles in the plot. This popular theatre was no longer only for the elite. Commedia characters became the voice of the people. French Traditional Pantomime emerged to bypass restrictions on published plays, incorporating circus skills, mime, commedia characters, and non-literary scenarios. The film Les Enfants du Paradis illustrates what this theatrical world was like, and this presentational performance style contributed to 19th Century comic operas.
These are some of the skills I studied as a young actor in Paris with the Master of Mime, Marcel Marceau. Marceau created a universal language of human behavior, allowing him to present the same mimedramas in various countries where audiences spoke different languages, yet everyone laughed at the same moments and hushed at the same scenes. This is similar to what opera singers achieve with their voices, suspended in a non-realistic manner, and which touch everyone emotionally. The challenge for the singers in our production is to combine these corporeally specific Commedia-based performance skills with the equally demanding vocal techniques of Opera, finding the proper balance.
Just as audiences would struggle with an actor delivering Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter while tap dancing, we do not want a singer to move excessively while performing a virtuoso patter aria. Musical humor is punctuated with lazzi, the commedia version of physical motifs, which are similar to vocal ornamentation in operatic singing. The suspension of time and action creates opportunities for both comedy and the revelation of dramatic truth. Both the Commedia dell’Arte and Rossini’s music demand virtuosity.
The Barber of Seville
May 3 – 18, 2025
