FROM AROUND THE WORLD: BERKELEY, CA.(Review)

On March 23, Berkeley Opera launched a brief run of Le Nozze di Figaro, derived from The Flexible Figaro, an unpublished English-language performing edition by Sherwood Dudley, with translations by Miriam Ellis and Dudley.

Mozart and Da Ponte had to excise considerable dialogue from Beaumarchais's rabble-rousing stage play just to get their opera adaptation past Viennese censors. In 1793, shortly after Mozart's death, with the French Revolution in progress, the directors of the Paris Opera mounted a production replacing Mozart's harpsichord-accompanied secco recitatives with Beaumarchais's spoken dialogue. When the results proved exhaustingly long, Beaumarchais himself revamped the work. The resulting amalgam, which also bombed, lay ignored until Dudley researched the original production, upon which he based his flexible performing edition. Berkeley's production marks the first time a regional opera company has drawn upon Dudley's research.

Musical director Jonathan Khuner (assistant conductor of San Francisco Opera) and stage director Jenny Lord created a compact, two-act, 200-minute version of the opera. Arias were English translations of Da Ponte, but much of the dialogue was drawn from Beaumarchais. In one monologue, Figaro says of Count Almaviva, "You took the trouble to be born a nobleman; otherwise, you are a very ordinary man"; Marcellina delivers a fiery feminist speech that stunned late-eighteenth-century audiences. (Unfortunately, the speech was burlesqued here.) The letter duet was shifted to late in the production to further dramatic exposition; the translation was modernized with sometimes salty slang.

Donovan Thompson's period costumes were pleasing. In Melpomene Katakalos's set design, minimalist stage pieces, arches and doors were wheeled about by chorus members. The Countess was wheeled in on a ...