Barber of Seville
The Barber of Seville
By Gioachino Rossini
Vancouver Opera
Conducted by Robert Tweten
Queen Elizabeth Theatre
In Vancouver on Saturday
Forty years ago, the ample Marilyn Horne was an unlikely Carmen. It was not easy, as she spat cherry pits across a stage, to believe in her irresistibility. Yet once she started singing, the voice became the seductress and that was that.
Opera has always asked its audiences to suspend disbelief to rather extreme degrees. Today's cinematic casting means audiences don't have to work quite as hard, but relinquishing our desire for verisimilitude is still part of the operatic experience. Director Dennis Garnhum's farcical take for Vancouver Opera on Rossini's Barber of Seville – set in a cluttered movie-prop warehouse in 1940s Spain as costumed extras rush about – toys nicely with an audience's willingness to believe anything for the sake of a good voice, and even ends up making some of the characters more believable.
Take Figaro, the cunning, matchmaking barber who fixes, for a price, the classic opera buffa tangle of suitor, maiden, lascivious old man and his slippery amanuensis. One has always wondered how this charming fellow got so chummy with the sequestered Rosina. Dennis Garnhum fixes that in a flash: His Figaro – the marvellous young baritone Joshua Hopkins – isn't a barber but a hair stylist, all prance and flounce, as obsessed with tweezing his own eyebrows as he is with meddling in his clientele's affairs. Up in Rosina's little room, he's perfectly at home rooting through her lingerie drawer for something to wear.
And what does Garnhum do with his short, plump tenor, René Barbera as Count Almaviva? He plays him as a caricature of an Italian tenor. Barbera even sounds like an old-fashioned opera singer: the pressurized, sustained sound with glints of metal in its high end, the smooth, somewhat imprecise coloratura, the theatrical high notes, held just a little too long. And when he masquerades as a music teacher, costume designer Parvin Mirhady situates him hilariously, somewhere between Liberace and Harpo Marx.
Thomas Hammons, as lusty old Bartolo, and Thomas Goerz, as the unctuous Basilio, do justice to their respective stereotypes, and mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy is as pretty a Rosina as we could wish. The joke is what Rosina could possibly see in Almaviva, but Eddy prefers to play her gorgeous voice for laughs and let the incongruity of her suitor work on its own. Her high notes are there for a reason (her corset's being tightened, say); and her low register, as chocolaty as a tenor's and often exaggeratedly so, keeps reminding us that it's only make-believe. In between Eddy does some lovely singing, as indeed does all the cast, most particularly Hopkins's mellifluous Figaro. But so integrated into the comedy is the serious singing (which never focuses on vocal display per se) that we take it in stride. Perhaps that's Garnhum's cleverest twist on the most unbelievable part of opera – the fact that it's all sung in the first place.
Happily Garnhum hasn't gone to the trouble of rationalizing the plot within its new setting. The movie set is just an excuse for dressing up the chorus in tacky soldier costumes and oversized suits, for movement on stage, and for borrowing associations with old cartoons and movies, from Bugs Bunny to La Cage aux Folles. Make connections if you like, he seems to say, but don't try too hard. Barber has endured for 150 years because it has made people laugh. It still does.
The Barber of Seville runs to March 25.
Special to The Globe and Mail