7.0
And….
Colin’s Cultural Corner
The Barber of Seville
28th Feb 2023 - Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
This is obviously a biggie and it had to feature somewhere on my must see list. Also pretty obviously I was aware of the vague outline of the plot and some of the songs beforehand but I’d never seen this before so I was going in, perhaps not cold but at most lukewarm.
A quick plot summary would be to say boy (actually a Count) spies girl from afar. Boy tracks down whereabouts of girl and basically stalks her whilst falling in love with her and doing various equivalent of holding a flash mob to demonstrate his love.
He’s of course never spoken to her but this doesn’t cool his ardour.
Meanwhile, Girl is underage and is lodging with her guardian an aged doctor who is determined to keep her under lock and key until she’s of age and he can marry her and get his hands on her mighty assets. Oi! Minds out of the gutter you lot! She’s got money that’s all!
Enter the titular tonsorialist dressed as a combination of Where’s Wally and with a very passing nod to 1980’s kids TV presenters and Malvolio (albeit without stockings).
He is persuaded/paid to help Boy/Count get inside the doctors house and declare love for Girl/prisoner.
Much hilarity ensues with Boy/Count adopting various disguises to get into the house and to pass a message to Girl.
I say hilarity in the way that I would if perhaps King Lear had been described as a comedy. Apart from some sight gags and some admittedly quite clever running jokes about what a “modern” opera would do (what springs to mind is Monty Python and “Song That Goes Like This” from Spamalot
) it struck me as being perhaps a trifle thin.
There was nothing wrong with any of the performances really but Boy/Count just didn’t do it for me. Perfectly ok voice but it was the physicality which let him down as he just didn’t have the presence really to carry the audience with him.
It wasn’t helped by the staging. Basically the set was a huge box which featured sliding panels to reveal doors, windows, other characters etc. There’s nothing wrong with that as a design but Avenue Q did it better. And perhaps unfairly I expect more from the Royal Opera.
Costumes were a bit muddled with Girl/Prisoner seemingly wearing something out of the 1950s and half the cast similarly dressed with the remainder wearing things more suited to the 1750s, gentlemen in frock coats for example.
When the box set was hoisted up and started to move around the stage to an accompaniment of strobe lighting and moving the back wall of the box to give the illusion of more movement - all designed to illustrate how the characters were feeling overwhelmed at the time - I felt positively vertiginous and found myself gazing up at the ceiling and/or closing my eyes. Admittedly the fact that I was in my least favourite seat in the gods didn’t help as there’s a weird thing going on there for me with a wall in front of half the seat and the other half having a clear line of sight all the way down to the conductor. I won’t be sitting in that seat again. In fact I’ve cancelled my ticket for Turandot which was in that seat and I’ve rebooked a better one. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that I can sit in a seat and not feel sick.
So perhaps I’m not in a position to fairly comment on Barber of Seville but it’s got a lot of work to do to persuade me to see it again. That will likely happen when it’s a different production, perhaps a more intimate production perhaps. Perhaps I should accept that I’m learning what type of opera I enjoy and that opera buffa just doesn’t grab me as much as the more lyrical ones.
I forgot I’d not finished the plot! Count marries Girl eventually.
(But if you know Marriage of Figaro then you know that they don’t all live happily ever after because would you believe it, but a man who falls head over heels in lust with someone he spots in the street can’t be trusted to be exactly faithful.)
