Santa Fe Opera makes 'Figaro' a tragicomic tale for terrifying times

The other week, I wrote about going to the Santa Fe Opera’s “La Bohème” on a first date. The Journal received so much positive feedback about that piece that they decided to send me back for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” But “marriage” is a pretty scary word to throw around on a second date, and Danielle — my date from last time — said she’d rather our next meet-up be something a bit more casual. So, for “Figaro,” I went with friends.

More accurately, I knew my friends Amy and Valery were planning to attend together, and Amy put me in touch with a documentary filmmaker named Stephanie to be my plus-one. The four of us planned to meet for the pre-opera tailgate.

Stephanie and I arrived at the same time, just as Amy was texting, “We have a car repair issue and had to pull into a gas station.”

Valery’s engine had overheated, and they would have to wait for it to cool down before adding coolant. They would miss the tailgate.

Stephanie and I found a picnic table. As we unpacked our cheese dip and charcuterie, she told me about a recent project where she had traveled around the world, interviewing filmmakers in different countries. She spoke of the bravery of those in places like Azerbaijan and Uganda, where artistic expression can have deadly consequences.

“It’s starting to get that way here,” I quipped.

The director and costume designer for “Figaro,” Laurent Pelly, has set Mozart’s opera in Spain in the 1930s during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Not the most obvious backdrop for a lighthearted opera buffa, but an appropriate one for what many see as our own increasingly authoritarian world.

Chantal Thomas designed the set. She and Pelly are great collaborators, having worked together on over 60 past productions, including many operas. For “Figaro,” she has designed a kinetic set consisting of a central circular platform turned by a series of gears on either side of the stage. In the center of the platform is a two-story assemblage of doors, windows and stairs — all outlined in black and white, as in architectural elevation drawings. This architectural set piece is hinged, opening into many configurations throughout the opera, like a big puzzle box.

As “Figaro” begins, the characters take their places on the perimeter of the revolving platform. Their period costumes and static arrangement bring to mind Disney World’s Carousel of Progress with its creepy automatons. Their stylized blocking, and the fact that they’re dwarfed by a massive clockwork machinery, symbolizes their relative powerlessness — cogs in a wheel, as it were. Although the characters in “Figaro” attempt to exercise free will by means of often harebrained schemes and stratagems, their plans backfire, and they all suffer the inexorable consequences.

The sky behind the stage is yellow and pale amethyst. One of the great joys of the open-air Santa Fe opera house is feeling the breeze and seeing the sunset and having the fictive world of the stage meld into our own enchanted landscape.

Riccardo Fassi as Figaro sings a duet with his bride-to-be, Susanna, portrayed by Liv Redpath. Although their duet begins flirtatiously, Figaro soon becomes consumed with suspicion.

“Suspicion makes my blood run cold,” he sings. It’s a running theme.

Fassi’s Figaro is inward-focused. He sings with a tightness that speaks to the character’s repressed anger and paranoia — as opposed to Florian Sempey’s Count Almaviva, whose anger and paranoia is powerfully, frighteningly, commandingly loud.

Susanna is too smart and resourceful to be an ingenue, but she still has a purity and sweetness to her, which Redpath’s soft, celestial voice captures well.

The barely adolescent Cherubino is a classic trouser role, and the gifted mezzo-soprano Hongni Wu plays him with all the hyperactive nerdiness of Martin Short’s old Saturday Night Live character, Ed Grimley, complete with high-waisted breeches and slicked down hair.

We in the audience know that Wu is a woman, of course, and it’s possible to read a queer subtext into the opera, particularly since a major plot point involves Cherubino dressing up as a woman — a sort of double-layered drag.

“Every woman makes me blush, every woman makes me tremble,” Wu’s Cherubino sings. It’s certainly more palatable for contemporary ears to imagine those words coming from a young woman than a horny incel. Either way, Wu brings tremendous heart to the role.

Toward the end of Act I, Figaro and Cherubino chase each other in and out of doors on the revolving stage. “Figaro” is often described as a door farce, with a lot of hiding, seeking and moments of mistaken identity playing out on either side of locked and unlocked doors. Pelly and Thomas bring these door farce elements to the fore by having the characters interact with an M.C. Escher-like set, whose exact configuration is constantly changing.

During intermission, Amy and Valery told me the car couldn’t make it back to Albuquerque, so I said I’d give them a lift. Stephanie, meanwhile, hadn’t realized how long the opera was, so she bid us adieu and hit the road for her two-hour drive home.

I couldn’t help but connect our own comic misadventures to those of the characters in “Figaro.” Like them, we seemed mere cogs in a machinery of circumstances beyond our control.

“It’s weird to be attending a comic opera while our democracy is collapsing,” Amy said.

I guess that’s why Pelly set “Figaro” in Franco’s Spain, a reference to his perception of the banality of evil in our own geopolitical universe. These overtones, combined with the ever-present image of grinding gears, make the Santa Fe Opera’s “Figaro” darker than other versions. Watching the characters’ comedic shenanigans play out against an offscreen universe of wars and increasing instability produced an unsettling feeling, not unlike Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film, “Zone of Interest.”

In Act III, Marina Monzó’s Countess Almaviva stuns in a fuchsia gown with pointed shoulders and sparkling ruby earrings. In a production with a mostly black-and-white palette, the Countess provides a much-needed pop of color, along with the Count’s gold bathrobe and a brief flurry of orange flowers in one scene, which reappear later. Monzó is one of the more powerful singers in “Figaro,” too, along with Sempey, who plays her husband, the Count.

Throughout the opera, the singers harmonized beautifully in all of the slower duets. Some of them struggled in the fast-paced parts, but Mozart’s rhythms are notoriously difficult.

At the end of Act III, during Figaro’s marriage ceremony, the Count announces fireworks. We don’t get them, sadly, apart from a piffling puff of pyrotechnics in the gears before the stage breaks open. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Act IV, takes place on a far more minimal stage — almost a Robert Wilson feel — with the characters’ clockwork universe in shambles. They wander around with flashlights, lost and adrift among broken gears. For an opera in which the characters spend most of their time trying to confuse, manipulate and control one another, it’s only when they learn to let go of control that they become better people. Again, the comic action is rendered tragicomic by the set and the staging. But that’s a good thing, I think. Thomas’ and Pelly’s production pulls the deeper, darker dimensions out of the opera as a counterweight to the silliness.

It was nearly 1 a.m. by the time we dropped off Valery’s car at the collision center. On the long drive back to Albuquerque with her and Amy, we had a spirited conversation about our lives in New Mexico and the unexpected journeys that led us to where we are. The gears of our lives — or our cars — may come apart from time to time, and we may feel lost and adrift in a terrifying world. But as long as we hold onto our humanity — and each other — we can maintain joy and purpose in our lives. I guess that’s the moral of our evening’s story.

That, and I need better clothes, according to Amy.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.