5 / 9
5
A New Flute: About Lyric’s Production
By David Buch
At the heart of
The Magic Flute
is a fairy tale, a
magical story appealing to the imagination of
childhood.
In this new production, conceived and directed by
the Australian Neil Armfield, the fairy tale is placed right at the center,
but it has a new twist.
It is set in the early 1960s, and in a Chicago suburb, mostly populated
by German-speaking immigrants, a precocious fourteen-year-old
boy hits on the idea of a domestic performance of their favorite
opera, Mozart’s
The Magic Flute
.
He engages two of his friends (they
become the Three Boys in the production) and various members of
the German-speaking community, several with musical training and
proficiency learned in their native Austria and Germany.
The setting is a typical suburban house and yard of middle-century
America.
The children create the props and costumes from
household items, partly inspired by images from the Disney films of
the time. Their inventiveness and imaginations prove up to the task,
as common articles like cans and cardboard boxes serve as the
material to create the theatrical devices required by the fantastic
libretto.
The result is an intimate performance that becomes a transcendent
and ennobling experience for this small community of émigrés.
Through the love of music, the delight in theater, and the innocence
of childhood, they renew their trust in the nobility of human beings
moving beyond the impulse for revenge and domination over others.
The imagination of children is the strong frame that allows the details
and the magic events to have context.
The adult characters observe the events in the opera’s plot and the
details of the production simultaneously, just as we, the audience,
do when we experience the theatrical event before us, renewing our
own sense of community in a larger public venue – Chicago’s Civic
Opera House.
< > CONTENTSSarastro’s entrance in Act 1 design by Dale Ferguson