Review: Barber of Seville

This opera was so good that I fear I cannot gush any harder than all the other reviewers. All the elements were great. Singing, acting, humor, stagecraft were all wonderful.

Instead, I am going to go on and on about the details.

• I could not imagine how, when Figaro shaves Don Bartolo’s bald head, how he got a perfect dollop of shaving cream to sit up like a caterpillar at the top. That can’t happen every time, right?
• In the scene where the Count is given a choice of disguises, the two he doesn’t choose are Van Gogh’s Straw Hat Self-portrait and Magritte-apple-face-businessman. I loved that.
• Whoever did the spectacular staging for La Bohème must have done the same for The Barber of Seville. Just a chaos of colors and bustle and song and giant sunflowers. And an absurly long piano, four pianos side-by-side, that kept vanishing. There’d be a scene change, and then poof, the piano that spanned the stage would be gone and I couldn’t catch them doing it at all.
• That may be because the stage was filled with waiters carrying plates, and someone in an untied straightjacket flailing his arms like a giant used car balloon man, and soldiers with hybrid x-ray vision / Groucho glasses.
• There was one particular soldier, a tall man listed in the program as “Jared Werlein, An Officer.” I believe the audience sees him in the first scene as the simpleton who plays – or cannot play — the triangle. That man assumed just the most delightfully vacuous face I have ever seen. Riveting. And then he switches into his soldier role and takes over the stage there. I am afraid that during the curtain call I yelled out, “Yay! Tall guy!”

The only bad thing was that I saw it on a school night, and I couldn’t go to sleep because the opera kept bubbling in my head.