The Barber of Seville, San Francisco Opera, Nov. 17 2013

The previous productions in San Francisco of Barber of Seville that I have seen were quite successful. There was the “classic” set that portrayed what could easily have been the outside and the inside of a fine home in downtown Seville ca. 1780, and then there was the “rotating house” set with Figaro arriving on an electric Vespa and with all kinds of hilarious stage business to go along with it. But this one was a clunker.

The basic construction of the set was a floor rising from the front of the stage to the back, with the floor half the width of the stage in front (on the right as we viewed it) expanding to the full width of the stage in the back. On the right side of the raised floor was a structure of blank walls and rectangular windows, including a large open window on the second story from which Rosina could “accidentally” drop her aria from The Pointless Precaution. You could imagine that your viewpoint was from the street, looking at the outside of Dr. Bartolo’s house. A few extra props were brought in for Act 1 Scene 2, enough so that you could imagine that you were inside the house. For Act 2, interior walls slid out perpendicularly from the wall that we had been looking at, and chandeliers descended from above, giving a better suggestion of “inside.”

The left front half of the stage lacked any set elements, so this is where Figaro could ride in on a utility tricycle, the rear two wheels bearing a large box containing all the implements of his trade, and Count Almaviva could be brought in in what resembled a rickshaw. Fiorello’s musicians crawled out from underneath the floor, making them look uncomfortably like rats coming out of a sewer. During Don Basilio’s “La Calunnia” aria a large swath of fabric unrolled itself from the floor down to stage level and fans blew the trailing edge across the empty portion of the stage. This action presumably echoed the text, which describes slander as “a gentle breeze” that gathers force little by little. Pretty obvious, trite, and redundant.

Our cast:
Figaro: Audun Iversen
Almviva: Alek Shrader
Rosina: Daniela Mack
Doctor Bartolo: Maurizio Muraro
Don Basilio: Andrea Silvestrelli
Berta: Catherine Cook
Fiorello: Ao Li
Conductor: Giuseppe Finzi
Director: Emilio Sagi

I had a hard time finding much to praise in this performance. Even Andrea Silvestrelli, whom I am a big fan of, seemed a rather pedestrian Don Basilio. Maybe Wagner suits him better than bel canto. I’ll go see the other cast, but only because a good friend recommended it highly. A gamma.