Il Barbiere di Siviglia

2021 San Francisco Opera Production

PROGRAM ARTICLES
Director's Note
Storytelling comes in many guises, and the story of how tonight’s production came to be is a testament to artistic resourcefulness and resiliency. Created in a matter of months (when a normal concept process spans years), the design team and I were tasked with completely transforming the set of our new production of Beethoven’s Fidelio (slated to premiere at the War Memorial Opera House in Fall 2020) into an outdoor 90-minute retelling of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. At first glance, Fidelio and Barber appear to have little in common yet both were revolutionary works that democratized opera and serve as symbols of hope. Along with Beaumarchais’ play Le Barbier de Séville, the original source for the opera, Beethoven and Rossini created gems of the Enlightenment period, highlighting themes of freedom and light triumphing over darkness.

From this foundation, we wanted our storytelling to awaken grand opera and the opera house from slumber; to celebrate the freeing return to live performance and shine a light on the beauty of the artistic process that makes it all come to life. Here we witness singers making the invisible visible, plucking melody out of thin air to weave a story. As they interpret Rossini’s music, text and characters we have come to adore, they take a tale that has been told for centuries and reveal it anew.

By pulling back the curtain to spotlight the comedy of the backstage world, we honor San Francisco Opera’s history, the opera house that bears witness to countless stories, and the people who have come together to share in the magic. Perhaps this drive-in experience will bring us closer together, as we jointly let ourselves go, basking in the music and the beauty that surrounds us. We hope this return to live opera is a celebration and a symbol that light and love will always triumph in the end.

—Matthew Ozawa

PROGRAM ARTICLES
Adapting an Opera: The Barber of Marin
By Jeremy Patfield

Contributing Voices:
John Del Bono, San Francisco Opera Scene Shop Foreman
Jessica Jahn, Costume Designer
Alexander V. Nichols, Set and Projection Designer
Ryan O’Steen, San Francisco Opera Production Manager
Matthew Ozawa, Stage Director
Matthew Shilvock, San Francisco Opera General Director
Tad and Diane Taube

San Francisco Opera’s home at the War Memorial Opera House has been closed to the public since March 2020. For the first time in a nearly 100-year history performances ceased. Now the Company is working toward presenting large-scale grand opera again. It requires a reimagining of what exactly that means and how to make it a reality in a new context for both the Company and our community.

Once it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to return to indoor performance this spring, we started exploring ways to return to the stage. We’re in California, so we thought: why don’t we take the show outside?

As one of the first groups in the Bay Area to return to live performance, the Company worked closely with doctors from UC San Francisco and the Marin County Department of Public Health to establish health and safety protocols. And that was just the beginning.

MATTHEW SHILVOCK: As we think about programming in this transitional period where we still have so many restrictions, one of the biggest challenges is how do you bring back a large audience and what are the ways in which you can do that safely? As we try to think through that equation, the idea of a drive-in was so important to that because it just eliminates the entire variable factor of the audience. The audience gets to be in their car. They get to be in their own bubbles. They get to be in their own protected environments yet still be in a place where they're watching live entertainment.

Live grand opera, performed outdoors, for a drive-in audience. But which opera? Well, going back to 2020 for a minute, we’d planned to produce Beethoven’s Fidelio to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth and we’d built a brand new set for that production.

For this drive-in event, though, we wanted something light, a comedy, something we could cut down to 90 minutes without an intermission—that way folks wouldn’t have to line up for the bathroom. We chose a familiar, beloved classic that we’ve turned to again and again throughout our history: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.

But that Fidelio set? It makes a perfect outdoor stage, for reasons that we’ll get into later. So we decided to call up the original design team from that opera and set them to work on a new concept for The Barber of Seville.

So, a brand-new adaptation of an old opera, on a newly-built set for a totally different opera, and moving the whole thing outside. Let me add that the timeline for a new opera production is typically two or three years. This outdoor drive-in performance would be developed in a matter of a few months.

I asked our creative team about their reaction when we first discussed the project with them:

JESSICA JAHN: I laughed out loud!

ALEXANDER V. NICHOLS: When somebody comes up with an idea I'm always game, and only later do I freak out and panic about what it is that needs to be done.

MATTHEW OZAWA: For much of my career, I have been sort of a Project Runway director, making it work under extremely unusual circumstances and within strict parameters. And here I was looking at the prospects of a very high stakes, tight, large-scale endeavor to take the Fidelio set and essentially rearrange and recreate the production and the designs for a Barber of Seville. And our goal through this Barber of Seville is to breathe life back into live grand operatic performance and connect with joy, liberation, and love.

Ozawa thinks Barber is the perfect title for this moment. It was written during the Enlightenment, a period of renewed optimism and freedom. It’s joyous and communal. There are strong themes of empowerment, particularly women’s empowerment, and perhaps most importantly, resilience.

OZAWA: I'm really drawn to the character Figaro. He is a factotum, a jack-of-all-trades, who really serves as a symbol. He displays determination and wit and decency and resourcefulness and in so many respects the qualities of Figaro are exactly what was needed for this project, in embracing resiliency and resourcefulness.

The creative team settled on a narrative framework for this adaptation that fully acknowledges our current reality: preparing for a first performance in the opera house after a long hibernation.

OZAWA: So imagine, props and furniture and costume racks under sheets, like an attic. They pull the sheets to uncover the furniture, they put on the costumes, turn on projections and essentially rehearse Barber and put it on that night in the opera house.

NICHOLS: We're trying to portray a reawakening in the opera house; a chance for the audience in the cars to watch that awakening happen through imagery that we've shot revealing parts of the opera house that many of them have never seen.

One significant challenge is reconfiguring the opera itself for the drive-in setting by carefully cutting and shaping the music and libretto to fit in the allotted time and streamlining the cast and musical forces, and doing so in a way that preserves the DNA of the original work.

SHILVOCK: We also wanted to experiment with new approaches. What does it mean to have a tighter version of the score where we change the storytelling in a slightly different way?

OZAWA: The storytelling will be very different, you know. There is no intermission. And in taking out some of the links of the story and then looking at what music remained and how to kind of distill it down to 90 minutes, it became apparent to me that I needed to rearrange the order of some of the story and music and building blocks of Barber. So I've taken some creative license to rearrange the musical numbers and thread it together in a completely new way. The most substantial music is included, so we actually didn't end up having to really cut anything that we felt was essential.

While Ozawa and his team were busy tailoring the score, Nichols and the production department were simultaneously at work on the Fidelio set to incorporate the new design elements for Barber.

NICHOLS: In talking about doing this outdoor performance, we needed a way to get performers up in the space. We needed something that was big enough to say, look at the stage and not at our screens on the side.

RYAN O’STEEN: The farthest car away from that screen is 375 feet, so it's like looking at the batter from center field at a baseball game.

Ryan O’Steen and John Del Bono were the chief architects of the transformation of the set.

JOHN DEL BONO: The set is a cube made out of framed trusses. When the idea first started getting kicked around about doing an outdoor show, it made perfect sense to be able to use this structure because being a big, open erector set it has a very low wind profile.

O’STEEN: The set creates a really nice two-level structure. The upper level is designed to be individual dressing rooms. The lower level frames out a rehearsal hall space. All of it is opened and closed by amazing LED panels.

And of course, for a new production concept, the Company needed new costumes.

JAHN: Figaro is fun! His costume is this beautiful green moleskin. The idea is that he's an every man, and we made these really yummy camel-colored vests and breaches. And he has boots, which I always love.

Unlike Nichols, O’Steen, and Del Bono, who are tasked with reimagining large-scale structures, Jahn has to focus on intricate details and textures and make them play in an unfamiliar setting.

JAHN: It has to be sort of sumptuous feeling because it’s like the combination of the audience being farther away than usual but then also being closer because of the jumbotrons. What does that evoke visually in terms of looking at people on stage?

So far we have an adapted story on an adapted set with adapted costumes. The final, perhaps most significant adaptation to consider was the venue itself. For this drive-in production, San Francisco Opera is partnering with the Marin Center in San Rafael, setting up a temporary home for eight weeks in the county fairgrounds.

O’STEEN: We were going to have to take that raw open space and turn it into a drive-in performance venue. We're essentially building a compound behind the stage, so it's no small undertaking. It is a small city back there!

I feel incredibly fortunate to have a front-row seat, from my own position within the production department, to witness and participate in this process. The care and creativity of the whole team is exhilarating. There are so many layers of complexity to this project, unlike anything we’ve ever done before, compounded by the fact that mostly we can’t be in the same space while working in an art form that is so inherently space-driven, so sensory and tactile.

And ultimately, I think that’s why everyone involved feels like we need to do this. To show that we ourselves are capable of adapting, as individuals and as a company. That we can lean on our resilience, and that we can re-emerge from this hibernation with a new story to tell.

DEL BONO: I'm sure everyone is really going to be loving the opportunity to share an experience together, even in a parking lot.

Jeremy Patfield is Production Finance Director at San Francisco Opera.