Audiences roared with laughter at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro when it premiered in 1786 every bit as much as they had reeled at Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ play of the same name two years earlier. Beaumarchais’ comedy offered even more searing indictments of ancien régime society on stage than Mozart dared or was allowed to make—Napoleon called the play “the revolution in action”—but the message in both was loud, clear, and enduring. Even as recently as 1988, the iconoclastic director Peter Sellars made international news by memorably setting Mozart’s opera in New York’s Trump Tower. That storied building’s most famous resident was already well established in the headlines, and Sellars’s approach gestured to the fact that class distinctions not only persisted but still caused palpable rage.
Palm Beach Opera takes a more conservative path in its productions. This Figaro, with sets and costumes by Leslie Travers, delivers a credible eighteenth century in a form compact enough to fold the opera’s four acts into two halves, courtesy of liveried footmen who push and pull the gray walls of Count Almaviva’s palace to change the scenes. Although this truncated approach is now commonplace, with only one intermission it was a long sit, and Travers’s sets did not always cooperate. Between Acts III and IV, something seemed to be amiss, with the footmen not quite getting a crucial wall into place.
With Stephen Lawless’s direction, however, we got hints of the opera’s revolutionary undertones. As the feudal household prepares for the titular wedding in Act III, Mozart’s stately wedding march is not just a foil to the principal characters’ anxiety and expectations, but also a call to action for Almaviva’s servants, who advance on him in formed ranks while he takes refuge behind an armchair. At the crucial moment, they cleverly release the tension by falling into a bow. In an earlier scene, Figaro, who is Count Almaviva’s valet, and other servants strip off their livery and tear down parts of a wall that contains the master’s family tree.
We are also treated to louder enunciations of the battle of the sexes than the original creators probably intended. When Susanna, Figaro’s bride, reconciles with Marcellina, a hostile older woman who has her romantic sights set on Figaro but turns out to be his mother, Marcellina’s line about the wrongful oppression of women is played up as a pointed objection to male oppression, eliciting a handful of chuckles. In a gesture of equality, Figaro’s Act IV aria “Aprite un po’ quegli occhi,” a denunciation of womanly wiles, unfolds under raised houselights as Figaro shines a flashlight onto the crowd in a direct appeal to the gentlemen in the audience, who knew better than to externalize any reaction.
Much of the rest of the time, Lawless kept the interactions playful but ribald. Although the physical comedy never quite descended to vulgarity, much of it was still fairly priapic. The English-language supertitles sometimes stretched Lorenzo da Ponte’s artful libretto into double entendres for the amusement of those reading along. The innuendos also titillated the characters on stage, who needed surprisingly little prompting to raise skirts, drop hosiery, or take liberties with each other’s intimacy. But if Figaro’s universe is fueled by sexualized humor and delivers casual intimacy, the opera’s exquisite sensitivities—aching loss, painful betrayal, outraged honor, grating injustice—do not ring quite as true. It was almost as though the plaintive sides of the characters were staid personalities intruding on a jocular frat party.
Palm Beach Opera has been fielding world-class casts in recent seasons, and much of Figaro’s roster is new to the company. The title role went to the booming voice of Adam Plachetka, a Czech baritone who has sung the role internationally and could make a credible claim to being the world’s leading exponent of the role these days. The voice is forceful rather than sonorous, with a bluster that recalls the younger Bryn Terfel’s best performances. One could argue for a Figaro with greater finesse, but Plachetka’s characterization was still plausible in outwitting Count Almaviva, who was performed with a sometimes restrained strength by the American baritone John Chest.
In her company debut, the Russian soprano Inna Demenkova sang a lilting Susanna. She took things light and slow initially, but her sensational “Deh vieni, non tardar” stopped the show in Act IV. Hailey Clark’s Countess Almaviva had a warbly entrance in her second-act cavatina “Porgi, amor,” a deeply sentimental call for lost love to return, but likewise came into her own in the second half of the evening. Angela Brower, an accomplished mezzo coming to Palm Beach for the first time, performed the trouser role of Cherubino, the count’s page, with the delicate balance of animus and anima the part needs to carry over the absurdity of a woman playing the part of a teenaged boy. Among the supporting cast, Dylan Gregg of Palm Beach Opera’s young-artist program stood out in commanding form as the gardener Antonio, an encouraging early-career part.
The conductor Gary Thor Wedow is also new to Palm Beach. He favored slower tempos that extended the work to nearly three and a half hours, even with this production’s lone intermission. At times, this allowed Mozart’s score to emerge with greater beauty, but at other moments, including the famous overture and septet finale that closes Act II, the effect was underwhelming.
