Love & Marriage

Horny, and having fun, at USM

By Doug Hubley

The Marriage of Figaro, at USM, Russell Hall, Gorham. March 16 through 25. Tickets $12, seniors $9, students $5. Call 780-5151.

YOUNG GUNS: Brian Wilson, Elisabeth Marshall, and Sara Sturdivant.

For many of us, the character of Figaro, the Barber of Seville, is inextricably tangled up with images of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and a bottle of hair tonic. And we won’t complain if you’d rather keep those impressions intact and read some other article instead.

But for the rest of us, 2001 brings a megadose of one of opera’s great comic characters. This Friday night, the University of Southern Maine opens a fully staged, five-performance run of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, in English translation. Held in Russell Hall on the Gorham campus, the production features a cast of 20 and a 45-piece orchestra, virtually all USM students.

The second helping comes this summer, when the Portland Opera Repertory Theatre (PORT) presents Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville, which share several characters and a common origin in the works of one French playwright. It’s sheer coincidence that both USM and PORT are presenting Marriage of Figaro. Any company that could present it, would present it: musically brilliant, funny, and with a frisson of progressive politics, it’s the most popular opera this supreme operatic composer wrote. For PORT, an added bonus is the literary linkage between Figaro and Barber, which provides a thematic vehicle for its goal of becoming an opera festival.

For USM, whose departments of music and theater are collaborating in this production, Figaro was just the right piece for the moment. Because it’s funny and works well in English, it appeals more to a college audience than the heavy tragedies of Verdi or Puccini. Its staging and orchestral requirements suited USM’s resources and Mozart’s music does not overtax still-developing voices.

Most importantly, the choice reflects the growth of USM’s music department, particularly in voice students, since the late 1990s. Committed to staging an opera every four years, the department had to look off campus to cast one role for its 1997 production of The Magic Flute, says Ellen Chickering, who teaches voice and is music director for Figaro. But this time there was ample talent on campus to fill a cast larger than Magic Flute’s, and most of the players are music majors.

“I think it’s going to be one of our best productions to date,” Chickering says. “We’re very excited.”

With librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart wrote Il Nozze di Figaro in 1786. He based it on the second of three plays by one Pierre-Auguste Caron de Beaumarchais, plays involving the same group of characters – the Count Almaviva, his bride, his wily barber Figaro, et al (The Barber of Seville was the first in the trilogy). Driving the plot is the feudal droit de seigneur, a lord’s right to sleep with any new bride in his domain: On the day Figaro is to wed Susanna, the countess’s maid, the count decides to exercise that option with her. Antics ensue.

Beaumarchais was enlightened for a nobleman, and his Figaro is as much about class struggle as it is sex. Pitting the servants’ wit against the upper crust’s money and power, its message of middle-class empowerment is clear. It’s less so in Mozart’s version, since his patron was maximum nobility, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Yet the message still puts an edge on the opera’s playful humor.

The USM production drops Seville in the 1770s in favor of some vaguely distant European past. That’s due to both the exigencies of staging the piece – small theater, impracticalities of authentic costuming - and a desire to idealize the story as a kind of youthful lovefest. “I’m emphasizing, rather than trying to hide, the youthfulness of the cast,” says Walter Stump, Figaro’s stage director and a member of the USM theater faculty. “They’re all horny, they’re all in love, and they’re all having fun trying to get out from under this stupid edict.”

Of course, having fun is often hard work. For the singers and orchestra musicians eyeing a musical career, experience with Figaro is a credential that’s essential but dearly bought. Part of Mozart’s genius lay in his ability to convey character and mood through music – a layered richness that gives the singers, especially, lots to digest. “I had no idea how intricate Mozart’s composition really was before I started studying it for this production,” says senior Elisabeth Marshall, one of two singers alternating in the role of Susanna.

Playing Count Almaviva, senior Jason Plourde says that he has watched Figaro videos so much that his roommates are up in arms. In preparing his performance, some of his most valuable lessons have been in managing his resources, Plourde says. Previously, “I sang full throttle all the time. Through these rehearsals I’ve discovered the technique of marking the voice, [which means] pulling back at times, just to save myself from total disaster.”

If you can let go of Bugs, Elmer and The Rabbit of Seville and throw yourself full-tilt into opera’s Figaro, USM’s Marriage, being in English and all, will make a nice appetizer to the PORT extravaganza. Bruce Hangen’s organization plans a touring production of Barber and a mainstage Marriage, true to period and in Italian, slated for three performances at Merrill Auditorium. With seven performances in total, plus lectures and films exploring the Beaumarchais connection, PORT appears to have attained that opera festival goal.

But that’s then, and the USM production is now. Despite a running time upwards of two and a half hours (and this after some cutting), the company predicts full houses for Figaro, both because Russell Hall is small and the production is shaping up as a winner. “It’s endearing,” says Stump. “The people involved are really good-looking people, they’re beautiful people. And they’re fun to watch, and they’re exceptionally talented.”

Doug Hubley can be reched at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net