Resisting Rossini, or Marlon Brando plays Figaro

Extract

When you find yourself faced with the task of producing some work by an illustrious author, flee from the terrorism of the classics … If you wish to display the slightest regard for the ideas which classic works contain, treat them without respect.

—Dario Fo, introduction to L'opera dello sghignazzo (1982)

Freeze Frame

When Peter Gelb engaged Bartlett Sher to mount a new production of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, opera fans who had seen or heard about Sher's blockbuster production of The Light in the Piazza the year before might have expected a radical—or at least radically populist—approach to the Rossini chestnut. The transition from that particular Broadway hit to doing Rossini at the Met made sense at some gut level. Not only does The Light in the Piazza put a positive (if clichéd) spin on the American encounter with Italy; but a couple of the show's songs are sung entirely in Italian, and one comic ensemble inescapably evokes Italian opera in its rapid patter and chaotically layered vocal entries.