A version of this review was first published on July 7, 2025 in Complete Colorado.
Editor’s note: Although we don’t normally publish opera reviews in this space, we are making an exception for the benefit of II’s readers.
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It was a pretty fair streak, but all good things come to an end.
Over the past 15 years, my family and I have been enjoying traditional summer performances at the Central City Opera. I say “traditional,” because Central City’s apparent business plan is to perform one or two modern operas each summer for those interested in experimentation, but then pay for them by attracting a larger audience with one or two presentations that have passed the test of time.
This year, the opera that has passed the test of time was Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Unfortunately, Central City decided to insert some experimentation into the Barber as well.
It didn’t work.
You can read the details below. But here’s the bottom line: If you adhere to traditional values, don’t go. If you like things to make sense, don’t go.
And definitely don’t take the kids. That is, unless you want them exposed to a lot of eroticism and homo-eroticism.
I make the last point with sadness, because the Barber is one of the minority of operas reasonably accessible to children. Last year, for example, my eldest daughter and I treated her eldest daughter (then eight years old) to Central City’s excellent production of Girl of the Golden West.
Before we go further, I need to make two disclosures.
The first is that my wife and I walked out of the Barber sometime after the half-way point. Frankly, I think we saw enough.
The second disclosure is this: Although I’ve been consuming opera since 1961, subscribe to the Met-on-demand, and belong to a leading Colorado opera support group, I’m not a professional musician or opera critic. So maybe everything I say is wrong.
But I don’t think so.
Background of the Barber of Seville
Rossini’s Barber was first produced in 1816. It’s a bel canto comedy. In the standard repertoire, it superseded an earlier operatic version by Giovanni Paisiello, which, as it happens, I saw in Vienna many years ago. Both works were based on a French comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais.
The Barber’s casting and story follow the tradition of ancient Roman comedy. It contains the principal stock characters: There’s the clever and scheming young woman (Rosina). There’s her lovelorn suitor (Count Almaviva). There’s a puffing old buffoon who wants to keep them apart (Dr. Bartolo), and a miles gloriosus—that is, a boastful soldier—in the form of a disguised Almaviva. Finally, there’s a “fixer.” In this opera, the “fixer” is Figaro, a street barber in Seville, Spain.
Afficionados may recognize the same figures in other operatic comedies by Italian composers. One is Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.
Productions based on Roman comedy are not supposed to be taken too seriously. This certainly is true of the Barber, even though Cesare Sterbini, the librettist, inserted a few cracks about other operas. But to work effectively, comedy still has to be reasonably coherent, and it can’t be overly-offensive. Otherwise confusion and anger get in the way of laughter.
Politics: The bug in the artistic ointment
Politics can screw anything up. This is true even of work by artistic masters. If you have ever read the poetry of Virgil, you know that the political passages are the most tedious parts. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of Virgil’s content is apolitical, coherent, and astonishingly beautiful. So we forgive him.
But Central City’s Barber goes beyond the limits of forgiveness.
I had my first hint of trouble when I learned—long after shelling out $300+ for a couple of tickets—that Central City moved the opera’s setting out of the 18th century and into the 1930s. Moving an opera out of its assigned time and place is generally risky. In fact, some devotees have a policy of avoiding productions that engage in that kind of anachronism.
Admittedly, this isn’t always a problem: Shifting Gianni Schicchi from its original Medieval setting to more modern times is mostly okay (although there are some incongruencies), because Gianni Schicchi takes place in Italy and central elements of the story are eternally Italian. Last year, Central City switched Girl of the Golden West from the mid-19th century California goldfields to the late 19th-century Colorado goldfields. Again, no problem. But 1930s Spain was a lot different from 18th century Spain, so I doubted it would work for the Barber.
I became more nervous when I read what director Eric Sean Fogel had to say about his production:
We decided to set the piece in 1930s Spain, just before the Spanish Civil War . . . At that time, the country was teeming with artists who were challenging the status quo, just as Beaumarchais’ Figaro . . . challenged norms in the original Figaro trilogy.
Inspired by Spanish artists like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miró, our Figaro is an artist performing a difficult balancing act—entertaining the masses without alienating the nobility. The 1930s Spanish surrealists[‘] . . . aims were largely the same—to fight against oppressive structures and clear the way for love and truth.
The drivel about “oppressive structures” is, of course, quintessentially leftist. But the passage is also weird because Salvador Dali was a supporter of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, an epitome of “oppressive structure.”
More importantly, though, whatever Beaumarchais’ Figaro was like, Rossini’s Figaro is no fighter against “oppressive structures.” Rather, Rossini’s Figaro is in the pay of a nobleman who hires him to invade the domestic life of a physician occupying a much lower station. Figaro fights against “oppressive structures” only in the sense that American leftists do: by helping the power elite beat up on the rest of us.
At least while Figaro is working for a member of the elite, he doesn’t pretend, like American leftists, to be “protecting democracy.”
Not surprisingly, trying to re-make Rossini’s Figaro into a social justice warrior creates distortions and incongruities.
I mentioned earlier that the Central City production contains a lot of eroticism and homo-eroticism. It’s time to provide some details:
There’s a female impersonator. A poster with a woman’s naked back and buttocks. Men kissing and hugging men. A sashaying, purse-carrying Don Basilio. A riot of shocking colors associated with the male homosexual lifestyle.
Also jarring, if less overtly sexual, are soldiers carrying broomsticks capped with big sunflowers instead of muskets. It looked like something out of Gilbert & Sullivan’s caricature of the 19th century English “aesthetic movement.”
Inserting all that junk into a bel-canto opera creates distortions, incongruities, and irritation that interfere with audience enjoyment.
Another instance of incongruity in service of eroticism is the placement of a sofa in the form of enormous red lips in Dr. Bartolo’s parlor. Now, Dr. Bartolo may be foolish, but he respects most social norms. We know this from his rejection of Don Basilio’s malicious plan to destroy, and perhaps kill, Count Almaviva through deliberate slander. So why would Dr. Bartolo have a sofa like that?
Here’s still another incongruity in service of eroticism—in this case, homo-eroticism. At one point, Count Almaviva and Figaro give each other big, cuddling hugs. In view of the social distance between them, this is absurd. The count is a powerful member of the nobility: Just showing the police his identification protects him from being arrested, even though he is clearly guilty. Figaro, by contrast, is a working-class street-barber. People in those respective stations didn’t hug each other, at least not in public. I suppose the incongruity might be forgiven if it were funny, but it was not.
Other defects
I don’t blame the singers for any of this. By and large, they did a good job. These were defects in directing. Here are a few more:
- The singing volume would have been fine for an opera hall such as Denver’s Ellie Caulkins, but was too much for Central City’s relatively small house. The director should have had the singers fit the volume to the hall.
- Bartolo was wooden. Because his body language did not communicate the personality of an arbitrary tyrant, you never developed the necessary sympathy for his unfortunate ward, Rosina. The director should have worked with the singer till he got it right.
- The portrayal of Don Basilio told you he was a homosexual, but obstructed what we really needed to know: Basilio is evil. The director should have dropped the homosexuality and worked on the evil.
- Why would anyone tell Count Almaviva to face the audience squarely when serenading Rosina instead of turning, at least partially, to her balcony window?
Praise for the Soprano
But enough: It’s time to mention one bright spot. It was Lisa Marie Rogali as Rosina. Her singing was great, and most of the time she was spot-on as the brilliant and saucy young tart who attracts a powerful nobleman.
She also brought to the production the relief of normalcy. I realize, of course, that “normal” is on the Left’s Index Verborum Prohibitorum, and that using it in “woke” circles can get you in trouble.
But I mean it as a compliment.