Some completely unexpected shameless self-promotion
/
It is not without a frisson of nostalgia that I have realized it has been twenty years since my swan song as artistic director at Newnan Community Theatre Company [NCTC], now known as Newnan Theatre Company.
When I made the decision to step down, in 2001, the position of artistic director was completely volunteer, elected by the membership along with the usual slate of officers. (We had no board of directors. It was more of an autonomous collective, if you will.)
Because of the advance planning required to put any season in place, the artistic director was always elected for the year after the current one so that the new a.d. could shadow the current one and begin drawing up their own plans.
Thus, in the fall of 2001 I announced that I would step down at the end of 2002, and they needed to elect someone to take over in 2003. (Our seasons ran Jan–Dec, only because many of us were educators and starting a season in Aug/Sep seemed like madness.) The company elected the fantastic Dave Dorrell to succeed me.
For my last season, I decided to go out with a bang by translating and directing Le Nozze di Figaro. I mean, a perfect, three-and-a-half-hour long 18th-c. comic opera in Newnan, GA, with amateur singers — what could go wrong? (Other than Dave Dorrell’s job requiring him to travel during performances and thus knocking him out as Figaro with three weeks to go…)
Such a handsome young man…
Amazingly, not only did we pull it off, we packed the house with audiences who roared with laughter, sold out every performance, and I retired a happy Count. (I blush to admit that without any suitable baritones at auditions I was forced — forced, I tell you — to cast myself as the Count.)
Sidebar
I will pause here to state my long held belief that the classics, like Figaro or Shakespeare or Moliere, are just as appropriate for community/amateur theatres to produce as any of these lame “mama-n-’em” comedies I see so much of these days. These pieces are just theatre, people, not unclimbable cliffs. As long as you understand how theatre works and can teach it to those who don’t, what’s to stop you?
For example, we treated Figaro like any other musical comedy — and it worked. Why wouldn’t it? (One opera aficionado in the audience told us that of all the Figaro’s he had seen all over the world, ours was the first to capture that joy.)
All of this to say…
You should do Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Here’s a PDF of the libretto with stage directions. Here’s the bare libretto in early 20th-c. frames (with links to production photos). I highly recommend Opera Practice Perfect, whose CDs provide a piano accompaniment for each character’s arias and ensembles. We rented an arrangement from the Welsh National Opera which allowed us to hire a string quartet and a flute, clarinet, and bassoon to join our pianist, although I can’t find a link to that at the moment. (There seem to be plenty of options, though.)
If you’re serious about it, I’ll even scan the score for you.
