“The Marriage of Figaro” is slippery. Just when you think Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte are settling into sweet comedy, this 1786 opera has a way of skittering into farce. Just when “Figaro” seems content to trade on melodrama, it deepens toward tragedy. That’s the tuneful glory of it all.
Call “Figaro,” at bottom, a comedy with heart.
And credit Virginia Opera with demonstrating just how warm and winning the heart of this colorful butterfly of an opera can be in the bubbling production in the Carpenter Theatre at Richmond CenterStage.
The master-servant shenanigans here put the stiff-upper-lipped denizens of “Upstairs Downstairs” to shame. But hey, this is wicked 18th-century Spain, not Victorian England, and that Spanish blood runs hot.
Suffice it to say that the lord of the palace, Count Almaviva, hankers after his wife’s maid, the plucky Susanna, much to the countess’s chagrin. But the naughty count had better move fast. Susanna and the count’s valet, the clever Figaro, hear wedding bells in their future.
This “Marriage” lasts three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions, and this may just be the fastest three hours and 20 minutes you’ll ever spend at the opera.
Director Lillian Groag has tricks up her sleeve and wonders to perform. She never lets her singer-actors forget the warmth that must underlie any worthy “Figaro.”
She has invented two colorful mimes straight out of the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition to weave through — and comment on — the action. In one particularly inspired bit of staging, she has a small army of eavesdropping servants tumbling through double doors when they are opened.
The four principals are beautifully cast. Baritone Aaron St. Clair Nicholson occasionally seems vocally outranked by those around him, but his ability to plumb the count’s comedy and pathos as an actor is awesome.
Richmond-born bass-baritone Matthew Burns and his real-life wife, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, share a winning romantic chemistry as they play off each other vocally and comedically through the evening.
Katherine Whyte, as the countess, puts her pure and soaring soprano to particularly good use.
The seven remaining named characters form a sharply etched gallery of comedic palace underlings. Jeffrey Tucker, whose bass could out-pipe a pipe-organ, is paired hilariously with mezzo-soprano Margaret Gawrysiak, who hankers after Figaro but may in fact be his mother. Another mezzo-soprano, Karin Mushegain, is a standout as the hormonally propelled teenager Cherubino, in one of opera’s best trouser roles.
They’re ably supported by a 20-member chorus, and conductor Steven Smith’s 34 first-rate pit musicians culled from the ranks of the Richmond Symphony.
This “Figaro” looks great, too. Peter Dean Beck’s traditional but versatile scenery gives each of the four acts a distinctive look. Howard Tsvi Kaplan’s Act 3 gown for the countess is a stunner, and Bradley King’s interplay of lighting in the countess’s bedroom at the top of Act 2 is a work of art in itself.
With this “Figaro” on top of gratifying productions of “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi Fan Tutte” in the recent past, Virginia Opera is on a Mozart roll. It promises to continue next fall with “The Magic Flute.”
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© Roy Proctor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 2013