John De Los Santos

Verdi and Boito’s Falstaff has been making audiences laugh for over a century and Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor for over four centuries. Why? What about this failure of a corpulent lecher has enabled theatre and opera fans alike to escape reality and applaud his idiotic exploits? Is it because he dares to interject himself where he is unwanted? Is it because we enjoy seeing him finally humiliated by those he has wronged?  Or is it because we recognize his reality and exploits in our own daily pratfalls?

With Falstaff, Verdi achieved the near impossible; he wrote an operatic comedy that is genuinely hilarious. Building upon his legacy is a tightrope, but one I’m eager to walk with Minnesota Opera. Coming from a dance background, one of my most reliable tools has been the use and centering of bodies in space. This doesn’t mean I plan on setting this new production on Mars, but rather injecting a realistic hyper physicality befitting the hyper situations our characters find themselves in. Passions and tempers run at lightning speed throughout most of the piece, and so will our phenomenal cast. But scattered here and there, Verdi also demands moments of sublime stillness. A stillness that also can elicit a stifled giggle as the characters grabble with the chaos surrounding them.

All these instances of running, writhing, seething, and stillness build towards answering the initial question I posed. When we laugh at Falstaff, we are laughing at a figure who lives in the past. We are laughing at his ineptitude at accepting the present. He refuses to believe that life (and love) has left him behind, and he is unable to catch up. And while some of us may be unwilling to admit it, we ultimately want him to because in some aspect, we are all the same as him.