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FIGARO
Lyric’s 61st season begins in style
with the return of Mozart’s
The Marriage
of Figaro
in an all-new production from
visionary director Barbara Gaines.
Audiences will be treated to, as Gaines
calls it, “a tsunami of love and passion
and jealousy and whimsy,” when the
production is onstage from September
26 through October 24. Best known to
Chicago audiences as the founder and
artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare
Theater, Gaines tackles her first non-
Shakespearean opera and promises
Chicago audiences a
Figaro
unlike any
they have seen before.
Gaines first saw the work as a young
actress, and was underwhelmed: “I
remember loving the music and feeling
so much joy and passion from it. And I
wasn’t seeing that on the stage!” She vows
that her take on this classic opera will
absolutely remedy that problem. “Mozart
is my greatest collaborator,” she notes
emphatically. “I will do
Figaro
the way
that the music makes me feel. You can’t
get to the fourth act of this opera without
feeling you’re in heaven. The gods have
descended—it’s just a feast of joy and love
and harmony.”
Though based on a celebrated play
by Beaumarchais,
Figaro
is not actually
an opera that Gaines envisioned herself
directing: “It was Anthony Freud’s
brilliance. He thought it’d be right up my
alley because it’s all about
character
.”
The Marriage of Figaro
is fast-paced
with a story that packs an intense amount
of action into one day, with a wedding,
multiple mistaken identities, and several
lovers’ quarrels and reconciliations
thrown into the mix. Gaines intends to
take full advantage of the compressed
time frame, noting that “the action
takes place over 24 hours, so things
happen with the speed of lightning, and
people’s passions are combustible. There
the comedy lies, because we’re all quite
combustible when we fall in love.”
Gaines’s essential vision for her
Figaro
is to create a production that does
justice to all the over-the-top emotions
embedded in the music, while adhering
to the universal emotions of the story:
“I’m trying to bring out feelings that all of
us feel while we’re hit with extreme love,
extreme jealousy, and the extreme desire
to be loved. It boils down to the simplest
human behavior.”
To bring this vision to life, Gaines
started from scratch—literally a blank
canvas that turned into her concept for the
set. “I thought immediately that it would
be a bleached-wood set,” she recalls. “The
costumes will take life, and the singers will
have life, against this background.”
Gaines’s longtime collaborator James
Noone, set designer for this production,
returns to Lyric after having created the
sets for Verdi’s
Macbeth
, which marked
Gaines’s acclaimed operatic debut in the
2010/11 season. He anchored the designs
for all four acts with a curved white pine
BARBARA GAINES
DIRECTS A
PASSIONATE,
WHIMSICAL TAKE
ONMOZART’S
MASTERPIECE
by
Maggie Berndt
IN LIVING C LOR