TENOR.com - The Opera Blog

You might think a great movie director could easily direct an opera - but directing movies and directing opera on stage are totally different animals.    An opera director doesn’t have the luxury of camera angles, special effects, multiple takes - and most importantly - the music happens, dictating the overall flow of the piece.  Opera is even different that theater because when you add the music and singing, you have to deal with timing and where the focus is on stage.

Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is what Woody Allen took on at the LA Opera.   Gianni Schicchi is an hour-long gem, part of a trilogy of one-act operas called Il Trittico, and the LA Opera staged all three last fall.  Sounds like the opera’s general director Placido Domingo was determined to use Allen, and he did an outstanding job staging this comic opera.

Here are some excerpts from this smart review By Mark Swed, Times Music Critic:

Allen also called “Schicchi” “funny compared to ‘Tosca,’ not funny compared to ‘Duck Soup.’ ” Don’t believe that either. A production of genius, his “Gianni Schicchi” is a riot. And I say this as someone seldom attuned to Allen’s comic sensibility and drawn, if at all to his films, to those in a more pretentious Bergmanesque mode.

But maybe all he needs is great material….
Allen’s “Schicchi” is really the Allens’ “Schicchi.” Updated to Florence in the 1960s, it stars the veteran baritone Thomas Allen in the title role, and what fun he is in his Mafia striped suit and two-tone shoes, his hair slicked back and his mustache rakishly thin. Loquasto’s set is its own riot, a mansion in wild disrepair. The opera’s 50 minutes are not enough to drink in the fabulous details.

But what is perhaps most surprising about Allen’s production, which is brilliantly sung and acted down to the most minor character and walk-on, is how uncinematic it is. He begins with a screen in front of the stage projecting silly film credits, but that only underscores the sheer theatricality of the classic farce that follows.

Allen — Woody, that is — manages to be both irreverent and absolutely true to the music and the spirit of the work. He adds all kinds of inventions in the bedchamber of Buoso Donati, who has just died. The relatives are gathered to read the will. Schicchi is a schemer brought in to forge a better one.

The young lovers, Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta (Laura Tatulescu) and Rinuccio (Saimir Pirgu) are uncommonly sexy. Jill Grove as the wiliest of the relatives is a hoot. Everyone is a hoot. In his greatest stroke of all, Allen makes even the opera’s maudlin hit tune, “O mio babbino caro,” hilarious.

Allen did not take a bow, but the dead Buoso did.

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The San Diego Opera opened this year’s season with Puccini’s favorite.

Here’s Marcus L. Overton’s informed review.

And here’s a puff piece on the Texan Tenor who made the big time.  Yee-haw!

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