travelswithalice

August 23, 2012

Romeo & Juliette at the Arena

I'm sitting a few feet from the orchestra pit, a rare occasion, probably unrepeatable. For some reason, tickets to Romeo & Juliette are cheaper than any other performance this season. Maybe the city wants to encourage people to go and watch the story for which their ancient city is most associated with. Never mind that the star-crossed lovers existed only in the imagination of Shakespeare and all the others before him who wrote similar story lines.

The thing about the Arena di Verona is, it's so immediate. you feel almost a part of the spectacle, which in many ways, you are. People watch other people with at least as much interest as they do the opera itself.

Loud festive music blares out as spotlights criss-cross the gradinata, the cheap seats on the upper unreserved sections, looking to rest on a lucky pair to be granted more privileged cushioned seating in the lower sections of the theater. Having scanned the length and breadth of the stone steps, the lights finally converge and rest on the chosen couple who gamely leave their stone seats to fanfare and a hearty applause.

I watch the people working behind the scenes for the opera. Stage managers setting up, stagehands clearing up, or musicians working out front. And I'm thinking, are female members of the orchestra here sexier than those of other orchestras? I think maybe they dress sexier. The wind section looks bored.

Onstage, an elaborately costumed character ceremoniously strikes a gong for the countdown to curtain time, to a smattering of applause and cheers.

As the sun sets late into the summer evening, in a reenactment of a time-honored arena tradition, members of the audience sitting on the ancient Roman stone steps light candles. The arena is bathed in a soft golden glow.

Soon, the conductor is ushered in; he takes an extravagant bow and strikes up the orchestra.

The chorus quietly files in, striding across the poltronissima front-row seats to take positions onstage. As the overture quietens down, the scaffolding/tower/curtain thing standing at the center of the stage begins to split apart in the middle. I hear the wheels trundling not very softly, separating the two halves to reveal the rest of the company distributed up and down their three tiers, a lone step ladder occupying center stage.

At the back, a huge canvas set is stretched across and up the steps by stagehands dressed in black. They throw sharp tall shadows on the stone steps as they exit upwards on the far side of the amphitheater. The effect is magical.

I chose to see this particular performance because of the much talked-about young Polish soprano, Aleksandra Kurzak. She is a perfect Juliette, her clear soprano liltingly youthful. She presents a Juliette who is young and spunky and party pretty in her satin bustier and short white tutu worn with pink kitten-heeled ballerina shoes tied up with silk ribbons.

I must admit the other players do not get much of my attention; I am too focused on Juliette. Nor does much of the singing; I am much too focused on the staging, which is spectacular. Exquisite medieval ornateness shares the stage with contemporary lines and Alice-in-Wonderland-like settings and costumes.

I love the recurring shiny beehive shapes and steely traps and metallic filigree swirls that inform the design of the modular sets. Like the deliciously ornate tower atop which is nestled Juliette's sweet, girly-girl bedroom. And in the scene of the aborted engagement to Paris where Juliette collapses in a poison-induced swoon, upright, clasped at the waist in a death-grip by a towering wheeled metal hoop-skirt.

I love most of all the not too depressing ending to the evening's performance. The lovebirds romp hand-in-hand offstage, up the theater's center aisle, exiting gaily in the back, having triumphantly risen- on the wings of love, we presume- from the obligatory death scene atop a sepulcher.

Ain't love grand?