www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com • September 26, 2008 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

eveningsout

Figaro director has many ways to 'just tell the story'

by Richard Berrong

Cleveland Opera Cleveland continues its second season with a great comedy, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Out director Peter Kazaras talked to the Gay People's Chronicle about what he is doing to make this production interesting both for Figaro veterans and first-timers.

To say that he was bursting with ideas would be an understatement.

Kazaras' principle in directing opera is that it should be "theatrical, musical storytelling." Differering from some European direc-

the audience watches and listens as the performers move and sing with no possibility of a retake or an edit, is something altogether different and more exciting.

To achieve this, a director needs the right cast, of course, and Kazaras had only praise for this one. A group of young singers with "ravishing sounds," they are "talented, beautiful, and fun," convincing as the mostly young characters whom they are portraying. That includes a Figaro, Jason Hardy, whom Kazaras described as "a sexy Bugs Bunny come to life." But then, this cast would have to be young and energetic, as Kazaras describes this as an "extremely physical production."

One of the cast, Carolyn

Kahl,

takes on one of opera's great cross-dressing parts. The mezzosoprano plays Cherubino, a young man with a fully-developed but not yet controlled libido. 6'1" tall, she will, Kazaras assures, provide a "rather

Peter Kazaras

confusing" but highly intriguing presence for viewers of any sexuality. For the Count, Corey McKern, Kazaras is introducing a seldom-heard variation of the Act III aria. Mozart provided this for the singer that took the role in a 1789 revival, who had a brilliant, higher voice.

All this comes together September 26 and October 4 at 8 p.m., September 28 at 2 p.m., at Playhouse Square's State Theater. For tickets, call 216-241-6000 or go to www.playhousesquare.org.

Richard M. Berrong is co-coordinator of Kent State University's LGBT Studies minor.

DONALD LEE

ONCE IN YOUR LIFETIME

PARIS 1900. CLEVELAND 2008

Susanna averts a scandal by helping Cherubino jump out a window in The Marriage of Figaro.

tors who make sometimes astonishing changes to attract audiences, Kazaras believes that his job is to "just try to tell the story."

How he goes about doing that is the important issue for him, however. As he explained, "There is a way of telling the story where people do stuff on stage that the audience believes, and a way of telling it where the audience goes, 'Oh, that's opera.'

"I will always go for the first thing," Kazaras emphasized, and then proceeded to explain how.

Opera is about artifice. People sing rather than speak, curtains go up and down, etc. But still, it is "a representation of stuff that goes on every day": jealousy, love, hatred, anger, and other emotions as varied as the voices and languages expressing them. As Kazaras sees it, his job as director is to make this "stuff" emotionally recognizable to the audience, so that it reaches out to their hearts and connects. When that succeeds, he emphasized, opera becomes a shared experience that is both thrilling and transforming, based on emotion and more.

Yes, you can sit at home and watch opera on television or DVD, he conceded. But the "sublime experience," the "spiritual existence" encountered on the best nights, when

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