As I read the program’s synopsis of Opera Modesto’s production of The Marriage of Figaro in my seat in the Gallo Center, waiting for Annalisa Winberg and her husband Roy Stevens to welcome everyone (by encouraging us to yell “bravo!” and “brava!” and “bravissimo!” like they do in Italy) I learned something very interesting: The Marriage of Figaro is actually the sequel to The Barber of Seville.
That is, both operas are based on plays by the French playwright Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais. In fact, both are part of a trilogy which ends with a play called The Guilty Mother. However, The Guilty Mother did not draw the interest of turn of the eighteenth century opera composers the way it did with Rossini and Mozart – until 1966 when the Frenchman Darius Milhaud wrote music with his wife Madeleine Milhaud wrote the libretto. (The most recent production I could find was something obscure in 2017 in New York City.)
What is even more interesting is that, while The Barber of Seville comes first in the trilogy, and The Marriage of Figaro second, the first one to be adapted and performed as an opera was actually Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1786. Rossini’s adaptation of The Barber of Seville premiered in 1816, exactly thirty years later, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. Of course, I’m sure today that any film director would have optioned the rights for all three adaptations at the same time, and produced and released them in the proper order. But apparently, back at the turn of the eighteenth century, Beaumarchais’ agent wasn’t quite so organized.
The reason I make the two hour trip to Modesto from my home in Napa to see an opera at the Gallo Center has much to do with the tone set by Stevens and Winberg at the beginning of every performance. They come out on stage and tell the audience that opera doesn’t have to be pretentious; it doesn’t have to be stuffy, or fancy, or pompous. (As I grew up in a small town outside of Bakersfield, I know that such an attitude is not going to get you very far in Modesto.) Opera should be fun. “So, when a singer does something you like, don’t be afraid to yell…!” And the audience boisterously practices their accolades before the show.
According to everything I’ve read, most experts agree that The Marriage of Figaro is the greatest comic opera ever written. And given Nathan Stark’s performance last night, it looks like Figaro is the funnest role to sing in the entire cannon. From the very beginning, when Winberg directed him to strut out during the overture, he was impish, mischievous, a little arrogant, and completely hilarious as the titular groom. Even though his aria in the fourth act, when he is alone in the garden before Susanna and the Countess arrive, waiting to deceive them, he still seemed to have a good heart despite his impetuous motives.
Darby Schmidt, as Susanna, Figaro’s bride, despite her youth, sang the role with a kind of understated authority, giving her the gravitas to insult the petulant Marcellina because of her age, played by Anakira Gabriella-Graça late in the first act. (Winberg directed Susanna to wrap Marcellina in a sheet, further belittling her, before they walked through the door.)
Schmidt and Mary Evelyn Hanley as Countess Almaviva were fitting collaborators in the ruse to fool Count Almaviva and Figaro. Also they seemed to have quite a bit of fun dressing up the darling Devony Smith’s Cherubino in the Countess’ bedroom. But Hanley’s sterling voice was at its most moving with her aria at the beginning of act two, when she bemoaned her husband’s infidelity. Winberg placed her at a vanity in the front of the mirror, as she nearly cried into her own reflection.
Devony Smith, played Cherubino, like an impish and spritely cherub – as the character’s name implies. Throughout the production she seemed to dance around the stage, like a grasshopper in a vineyard. In the first act, she executed one of the most famous scenes in all of opera with grace – hiding under the chair and eventually revealing that she hears Count Almaviva’s asking Susanna for sexual favors. Once the Count finds out that he is overheard, all hell breaks loose.
But no one in the cast was required to be more pompous and proud than Count Almaviva, and Robert Balonek played the role to a nearly porcine extent. The entire conceit behind this story was the tendency or expectation that a master would seduce his servant girl on her wedding night – which is a truly despicable power move. And given the opera was a subversive satire of the upper classes, Balonek had to play the Count to be unwitting and unaware of his own hubris – which he did to an infuriating degree. (Balonek as Scarpia in Opera Modesto’s Tosca was just as smarmy and maladjusted and evil. He has a type.)
While the acting in an opera is important, the music of The Marriage of Figaro will make or break the production. Caleb Yanez Glickman directed the orchestra with a precision and cleanliness that made Mozart’s music sound as fresh as the day it premiered in 1786. There was no break or discord between the singers and the orchestra – they wholly functioned as one. This is despite the fact that the pit in this smaller theater of the Gallo Center is sunk so far under the stage that we could only see Glickman’s hand and baton as he waved it above his head to show us that the maestro was in the pit and the show was about to start. It didn’t seem like he could see the singers, and they definitely couldn’t see him.
The competency of Maestro Glickman’s direction was apparent in the many ensemble duets this piece contains. That is, Mozart, and most well known opera composers, write scenes where singers are singing different words, but the music comes together beautifully in one song. (“Prima Donna” in Phantom of the Opera is an example of this.) There are too many of these to count in this opera, but they are the most complicated thing for singers to do. Each ensemble duet in this production worked like the gears in a finely tuned mechanical clock.
Quite possibly the one person in a production like this from a company like Opera Modesto that must do the most with the least was the set designer Corey Strauss. In act two, his design for Countess Almaviva’s bedroom was sumptuous and almost glamorous. In act three, with just the cut out of a window seat, and projections on the rear wall of the stage, he gave the impression of a huge stately mansion in Italy. (Though he might want to put some blocks around the wheels of that window. It seemed to move when the Count bounced onto the cushion.) My favorite, however, was the garden scene in act four. There was a gloominess to it, with dark lighting and a mausoleum looking construction, possibly to highlight the intrigue of disguises, cross purposes and deception that occur.
No matter what route you take, or what time of day you go, it is a solid two hour drive from where I live in Napa to the Gallo Center in downtown Modesto. But I can’t think of a better use of time or gas money, than to support a company whose productions exhibit this kind of positivity and fun. Smaller houses like this, not just those in San Francisco and Los Angeles, show that opera is not only for the privileged, but can be enjoyed by all.
John Henry Martin is a freelance theater critic in Northern California. He can be reached at jhm@johnhenrymartin.com. Published September 21, 2024.
