Facial hair figures prominently in Opera Australia’s national tour of The Barber of Seville, as a hipster barber takes centre stage to ensure that the course of true love eventually runs smooth.
Acclaimed young director Priscilla Jackman has moved Rossini’s brilliantly inventive and witty comic opera more than 17,000 kilometres from Seville in Spain to Seville bordering the Yarra Valley, and by 200 years from 1816 to now.
Cathy-Di Zhang as Rosina and Nicholas Jones as Count Almaviva in Opera Australia’s The Barber of Seville. Credit:Jeff Busby
“The barber tradition is a long and glorious one,” says Jackman. Barbers also used to be surgeons, and “Figaro [the barber] says he’s a jack of all trades, gives enemas, a bit of black market wheeling and dealing.”
Today, she says, there has been a renaissance of the hipster barber, where customers go in for a haircut and may be offered a whisky or gin.
“There’s a timelessness we can honour here, and also the high visuality of hipster fashion that takes a nod from the 1920s and 1940s but isn’t strictly set in one period,” she says.
This is OA’s 26th national tour, and it is a formidable program of just over two months and more than 20 regional centres in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania, as well as Canberra. It opens at the Drum Theatre in Dandenong on Friday.
“There couldn’t be a better choice than this opera,” Jackman says. “The music is infectious; it’s so joyful, delicious, exhilarating and super-fun, and it’s got that wonderful familiarity from pop culture. I hope there will be a real sense of that humming and toe-tapping, but also the sense of community that is the focus of this production.
“There are some surprises for the audience diving into the humour around moustaches. I really hope it creates a splash and brings some joy.”
To honour Yarra Valley women winemakers, the action takes place in a cellar door setting, Rosina’s Libations, where Rosina is the boss and Bartolo, her guardian who is plotting a forced marriage with her, is one of the staff. Jackman says Rosina is a gift as the heroine because there is so much range to be feisty rather than a victim or an add-on. “She’s a self-confessed viper.”
This year’s tour has a particularly strong cast of Opera Australia stalwarts and rising stars, with 12 singers who swap between principals and chorus or minor roles.
“Because of the duration of the tour and the distances we travel, it’s a feat of athleticism really,” says Jackman. “So we have two counts, two Figaros, two Rosinas.
“When I was given the honour of producing it, the response from everyone round the building was, ‘Oh my goodness, your cast. They’re amazing.’ The dynamic of that mix makes for a strong production: there’s a lot of optimism, a lot of can-do attitude that you need on a long tour.”
Jackman has worked in film, theatre and opera, and loves the differences. “I am in awe of working with singers; they are completely different creatures from actors,” she says. “In the theatre, actors are really invested in the psychology of the world they are creating, whereas in opera there is so much emphasis, obviously, on the singers.
“As a director in theatre you are top of the tree, entirely running the room, but in opera always the music will trump you, and there’s a sense of deep collaboration with the conductor that I find absolutely thrilling. In theatre, everything lives or dies on what you are doing in the room, whereas in opera you have the spine of that extraordinary music as a starting place. I can’t choose one over the other.”
OA’s Victoria tour of The Barber of Seville begins in Dandenong July 15
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