|
Barnard
Senior Lecturer Amy Trompetter directs and designs the American
puppet opera's production of "The Barber of Seville,"
May 1 - 11
New
York, NY, March 24, 2003—Opera singers share the stage
with over 40 papier-mache puppets—tiny, life-size and
huge— designed and directed by Theater Senior Lecturer
Amy Trompetter for a 20th anniversary production of Rossini's
The Barber of Seville, from May 1-11, 2003 at the St.
Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.
This ground-breaking
collaboration with the Brooklyn Opera Society and Arts at
St. Ann's was staged in 1983 as the first American Puppet
Opera, in which live opera singers shared the stage with a
cast of miniature, life-size, and giant paper mache and shadow
puppets. The original production earned praise from critics,
including The New York Times' Ed Rothstein, who called
it "remarkable, magical…an example of the best sort
of rethinking of the basic opera repertory."
The 20th anniversary production
will be an innovative interpretation with Kristjan Jarvi's
ensemble Absolute, which recently earned a Grammy nomination
for their album Absolution, in addition to a cast of
acclaimed opera singers. Trompetter's puppets will transfer
The Barber of Seville into a hallucinatory spectacle
in which characters take many forms and sizes: from a tiny
Almaviva buffeted by love in a dance with the giant limbs
of his beloved Rosina to a huge Figaro, all head, hands and
barber poles, bragging about his superior talents. Trompetter
is rebuilding all the puppets for this production, as the
originals were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1987.
In a recent
interview with National Public Radio, Trompetter described
the puppet characters as "Free. Free from, say, a naturalistic
representation, free from gravity, free from size, free from
the restrictions of normal natural laws."
She added that the audience can distinguish the roughly 50
puppets, representing only about 15 characters, by color cues.
"We have multiple characters on stage, so every time
you see the guy in the yellow with the orange leggings, you
know this is Almaviva. And if you see a giant puppet or a
tiny puppet or a middle-size puppet or a multiple of himself,
it's a color-coding, in a way," she said.
Puppet
artist and director Trompetter is a distinguished pioneer
in her field. After 18 years of performing, designing, and
directing for the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, she
founded the Blackbird Theater, in whose workshop she is currently
rebuilding the puppets.
A top-notch lineup of singers lends voices to the puppets
from giant hands at the sides of the stage. Figaro is sung
by Chris Pedro Trakas, a Nauberg Award winner, who has been
lauded by The New York Times as "an eloquent baritone
with a commanding sound." Others include Young Concert
Artist winners Randall Scarlata (Bartolo), and Anton Belov
(Fiorello), New York City Opera's Julia Anne Wolf (Rosina)
and Matthew Burns (Basilio), Elizabeth Weigle (Bertha), and
Brian Downen as Count Almaviva.
For more
information about the performances, please contact Blake Zidell
or Carla Sacks at Sacks & Co. at (212) 741-1000.
Contact:
Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907, ptuomi@barnard.edu
|
