Imagine the Monty Python team making a foray into bel canto. Or perhaps a Carry On special set in an opera company with little budget but a ready source of Stetsons. Charles Court Opera’s home turf is the late-Victorian middlebrow silliness of Gilbert and Sullivan, but the company occasionally ventures into other comic opera. In this outing directed by CCO’s artistic director John Savournin, Rossini’s Barber of Seville heads to the wild west (cue saloon doors, bourbon bottles, cowboy hats for all) and revels in a new high-energy, rhyme-fuelled English text by music director David Eaton. “Having a tryst, sir? I can assist, sir”, Figaro advertises in his big Act 1 number. Almaviva’s disguised turn as Rosina’s stand-in singing teacher involves a straw hat and a lot of ribbon, his line in “Nature! Flowers” whimsy smacking of pure Fotherington-Tomas (“Hullo clouds, hullo sky”) from the 1950s Molesworth books.
It’s all terribly English. There’s a long tradition of English Barbers, of course – right back to a few months after the opera’s UK premiere in 1818, when it was reworked around hits from both Rossini’s and Paisiello’s operas (plus some new music by the tireless adapter Henry Bishop) for performance at Covent Garden. The leading lady apparently “accompanied herself at the piano forte with great taste”, but no review records whether the audience found it funny.
