The rabbit in the room

The last-minute push by Vancouver Opera to fill the house for tonight’s opening of Cosi Fan Tutte brought back a memory that made me smile about a similar push 30 or so years ago.

Back in the 1990s, Mike and I went to the opera a lot. We had season tickets to Vancouver Opera and even went down to Seattle regularly to see second (as opposed to third) rate productions. One of those years the season featured Puccini’s Barber of Seville. When Mike mentioned this to me, I said, “Oh, the Bugs Bunny opera.” I got a sad shake of the head and tsk, tsk in reply.

Obviously ticket sales weren’t going that well, because a week before opening night there were full page ads in the newspapers. And do you know what the tagline was?

Ha, ha, ha. He who laughs last does laugh best.

In 2012 I was back in BC after living in the UK for a decade and The Barber of Seville was back on offer by Vancouver Opera. This was a great production.

I’m not normally a huge fan of updating the time and place for operas. Think the English National Opera’s decision to set Turnadot in a Chinese restaurant in Soho or how they managed to turn Le Nozzi di Figaro into a “marriage made in hell” with its 1930s English country house setting. (Or, I fear, this opening tonight mounties and lumberjacks Cosi Fan Tutte.)

But that Barber of Seville (best one I’ve ever seen) got it right. Instead of 17^th century Spain the story unfolds in a 1940s film studio sound stage during Franco’s reign.

And the best bit (with apologies to the many talented singers) was during the overture. As the orchestra begins to play and the curtains open, a guard enters the film set, flicking lights on as he moves around, He’s carrying a lunch box, which he eventually sits down and opens. And then, at exactly the moment in the overture when everyone in the audience is starting to sing ““Fi-ga-ro! Fi-ga-ro Fi-ga-ro Fiiii-gaaa-rooo” in their heads, the guard pulls a carrot out of him box and takes a bite.

The crowd, as they say, went wild. It was perfect.

As director Dennis Garnhum pointed out at the time, sometimes you just have to acknowledge the 100-foot rabbit in the room. (Click here to read more about his vision.)