Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola—known to us as Cinderella–is a silly little opera that takes its music very, very seriously. It is first-rate Rossini, composed when he was only 25 years old, but it’s a prime example of bel canto opera at its most sublime, and at its most complex as well.
The Skylight Theatre’s production of Rossini’s classic is both silly—in the best sort of way—and musically stunning (most of time). They’ve assembled an excellent company of singers, and an orchestra (a dozen players) that nails the score with energy and lyrical beauty. And they’ve given the story a postmodern twist that makes it as contemporary as an evening of late-night channel surfing.
The Skylight’s treatment of classic operas are usually driven by a concept, as it’s one of the theater’s missions to make classics vital and compelling. Last year, Fidelio’s theme of oppression and liberation was given a contemporary edge by setting it in India. For Cenerentola, Skylight Music Director Viswa Subbaraman and stage director Jill Anna Ponasik saw a chance to both flaunt and lampoon the conspicuously consumptive (pun intended) world of fashion. To dress their operatic clothes horses, they enlisted Cesar Galindo, designer to stars like Madonna and Justin Timberlake.
And they found the perfect model for Cinderella’s boorish sisters (played with comic savvy by Erin Sura and Kristen DiNinno) in Edwina and Patsy, the aging, chain-smoking, fashionistas of the British sitcom, Absolutely Fabulous. It’s a playful premise that Ponasik makes the most of, projecting a slide show of the sisters on a bender during the overture. They wake up in the flesh under piles of clothes in Lisa Schlenker’s giant, overstuffed walk-in closet of a set. Instantly light up their cigarettes, and start whining. They’re looking for men, of course. And daddy Don Magnifico (Andy Pappas), is eager to find them a prince to keep him in cigars and cravats.
Ponasik keeps the playful, wink-wink mood going throughout the evening. Even in the opera’s most spectacular aria, Ramiro’s “Si, ritrovarla io guiro,” the six men of the chorus pantomime some Gilbert & Sullivan-style schtick to emphasize the “whoa factor” in Luke Grooms’ bravura singing.
Arias like that—splendidly accompanied by Subbaraman and the orchestra—were the musical highlights of the evening. Grooms and Sishel Claverie (Cinderella) phrased Rossini’s melodies beautifully (Claverie’s starts things off right with a plaintive opening solo, “Una volta c’era un re”).
In the more comic roles, Papas, has a booming voice to match his Bob Hoskins figure, and Dimitrie Lazich (as the prince’s servant) and LeMarcus Miller (as the magical Alidoro) use their rich baritones to lovely effect.
The flaw in this production, however, is a major one—Skylight’s insistence on performing its operas in English translations. One can understand the reasons—demystifying the classics and allowing the operas to “communicate” their stories directly. But Rossini wrote for the Italian language, and his music—particularly his trademark, galloping rhythms and complex multi-voiced finales—is tailor made for the syntax and rhythms of Italian. Amanda Holden’s translation is charming at times—ripe with puns and some splashes of humor. But the English doesn’t sit comfortably in many of Rossini’s melodies. Ultimately, there are sections that were as unintelligible in English as they would have been in Italian. Or Sanskrit for that matter.
But the loss of some of that detail doesn’t detract too much from an opera that is both gorgeous and a heckuva lot of fun.
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A different sort of Cinderella story opened this weekend, though I don’t think playwright Christian O’Reilly thought of it as such. In Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s The Good Father, two people from distinct social classes meet–the college educated Jane and the working-class house painter Tim. But true love doesn’t descend magically from the heavens. The first bond instead is biological—a pregnancy created during a drunken post-New-Year’s-Eve one-night-stand. And O’Reilly’s beautifully drawn character piece charts the circuitous path the relationship takes as it adjusts to the reality of circumstance.
It’s an actor’s play—and the real-life married couple of Laura Gray and Jonathan Wainwright have obviously spent some time getting to know these characters. On the surface, it’s Wainwright’s show. Tim is chatty and sunny, a witty but slightly dim teddy bear, eager to take on fatherhood after his own trouble childhood. Jane recovering after a major breakup—a seven-year engagement—and is at first shell-shocked and befuddled. Through much of the play, he does most of the talking, while she does most of the listening.
But even as Wainwright jabbers on in his character’s delicious Irish rhythms, Gray is building her character in the subtle shades of her attentive silence. You can feel the conflicting impulses churning insider her: parent’s expectations, the ticking of the fertility clock, her imagined life with the kind of man she never imagined building a life with.
Credit this to two talented actors who know each other so very well. And to the sensitive direction of C. Michael Wright, who shapes the journey of these characters with careful eye and ear.
The result is MCT at its signature best. The settings are simple—a sofa, a restaurant table, a spare apartment. But the performances, language and the characters are rich and nuanced. It is theater in its essentials, and at its best.
