The Marriage of Figaro will also be livestreamed.
The production will be run under the standard set of COVID-19 safety guidelines. Because the garage door opens and the stage is far from the crowd, singers will be allowed to remove their masks.
Figaro is a highly physical opera with broad comedy and lots of contact between the actors, making adapting it to COVID times somewhat difficult. "With
Figaro, the challenge for me is to take a show that is intimate, farcical, and do that without a lot of physical touch," says Risner.
Avoiding touch isn't the only challenge during the pandemic, of course. The theater and opera worlds have been struggling to survive economic fallout, and the expenses of paying for actors, sets, costumes and licensing fees make it impossible for most companies to break even putting on shows with reduced capacities, Risner notes.