On Sunday afternoon March 7, 2021, The Boulder Opera Company of Colorado presented Mozart s
The Marriage of Figaro to audiences in the theater and online. The Boulder company is tiny, but I thought it would be interesting to see what they could do. Stage Director Michael Travis Risner set the time in the present and provided doors, potted trees, a table with a side chair, an armchair, and a few props for his setting. It fit the list of bare necessities required by the story and allowed the cast to provide considerable amusement throughout Risner s production.
Although the production was minimal but adequate, the costumes did not distinguish the nobles from the peasants and in some cases did not keep characters from fading into the background. A bright red throw on the armchair helps hide Cherubino but later is of no assistance to the Countess when she perches on the edge of that chair wearing a similarly colored shawl. There were no projections, however, and lighting design was ad
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.