It's near Cable St, it must be a riot!
Up Cable St again to get to Wilton’s Music Hall to watch the Charles Court Opera (CCO) version of Rossini’s Barber of Seville.
You may not be surprised that it has been translated to ‘the Old West’ and is now closer to the Barber of Deadwood. The English libretto has been re-written, with great and appropriate humour, by the Musical Director (and pianist) David Eaton, to great effect.
The principals, Jonathan Eyres as Figaro, Joseph Doody as our Count Almaviva, and Samantha Price as our Rosina, together with an excellent Matthew Kellett as Dr (and Barkeep!) Bartolo and Hugo Herman-Wilson as the egregious Basilio all sang (and acted) their parts convincingly.
The plot is (basically) Rossini’s, but with added gagging and curious dancing, the set is, sort-of, a Western Saloon and the music is a single piano played with immense and tireless gusto by David Eaton. Wilton’s (it was once really a Music Hall) has a great acoustic and all the singers can thus sing un-miked and operatically – they may mug it a bit, but they really do know how to sing Rossini, and it shows.
And finally, as a more general aside, it’s always a moot point whether ‘reimagining’ operas (and plays for that matter) is a wasted effort for novelty, or not. In this case (apart from the fact that dominating guardians filching the fortunes of their charges is less of a late 19th century American phenomenon) Deadwood is an acceptable Seville substitute, if only because the Seville setting is otherwise unimportant to the opera anyway, and is just a McGuffin to get Figaro in the plot.
It’s a great and enjoyable show (and they’re back in June to sing the G&S Sorcerer’s Apprentice). If you can’t catch this (it closes here on the 23rd March), try for that. 