Scrumptious Enjoyable

Dispensing with Cinderella’s glass slipper and reimagining her fairy godmother as a thinker, Italian composer Gioachino Rossini and his librettist Jacopo Ferretti had been “absolute geniuses”, enthuses opera director Neil Armfield. He marvels at how the pair flipped the script to embody the magic of theatre and meta-storytelling, making the story extra recognisably human than pantomime.

La Cenerentola (Cinderella) premiered in Rome in 1817. The fairy godmother is changed by a stage supervisor of types, a magical benefactor and the Prince’s former tutor generally known as Alidoro, performed within the forthcoming State Opera South Australia manufacturing by bass Pelham Andrews.

Costume designs for State Opera South Australia’s new manufacturing of Rossini’s Cinderella. Image courtesy of designer Stephen Curtis

Alidoro’s humanist philosophy is that it’s your qualities as a human being – not merely making an attempt on new outfits pulled from a fancy dress skip – that can see you succeed. As he sings in his aria, “The world is a vast theatre, and in the theatre, you can be whoever you want to be.”

In this manufacturing, Armfield and designer Stephen Curtis have positioned Angelina (Cinderella), performed by mezzo-soprano Anna Dowsley, in a milieu referencing the Nineteen Seventies – the Dunstan decade of progressive legislation reform and elevated state help for the humanities in South Australia.

The newly launched costume illustrations under provide a primary glimpse into this retro reimagining and Curtis’s playful imaginative and prescient for the characters. The Seventies replace additionally pays homage to the backstage groups Armfield and Curtis labored with on their earliest collaborations. Their first productions collectively came about in 1980 at what’s now referred to as the Dunstan Playhouse. In 1983, they staged Twelfth Night for the Adelaide Festival, which they subsequently made right into a 1987 movie.

“Whether you worked on the stage of the Festival Theatre or the Playhouse, there was this incredible crew of mechanics and stagehands that became family, working show after show,” Armfield recollects.

Neil Armfield. Photo © Shane Reid

He laughs on the reminiscence. “They all had Seventies haircuts in the Eighties, and we thought that was such a wonderful, playful period. [Our] experiences were of this bunch of great men and women, who loved the theatre, who you could see backstage, focused on the work, and we wanted to dedicate this [Cinderella] to them, really.”

Armfield explains that commedia dell’arte, the basic Italian street-theatre motion by means of which Rossini filtered this opera buffa, would historically contain a group of gamers organising in a city sq., basically needing solely a curtain – therefore this Cinderella can be offered in a easy house.

“Our set is just a floor, a curtain and a proscenium arch,” he says. “The wings are exposed. Rossini has this amazing chorus of men, who are presumably courtiers, to take us into new scenes and introduce us to characters. That group in our production will be our stagehands, who made theatre possible [for us] back in the Eighties.”

The solid consists of bass-baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes – whom Armfield has beforehand directed in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – because the pompous Don Magnifico. New Zealand-born Tahu Rhodes made his Australian debut because the Prince’s servant Dandini in La Cenerentola for Opera Australia and performed Don Magnifico for Victorian Opera in 2023. “He certainly brings a lifetime of discovery to the role,” says Armfield. “He’s not afraid to play with a character’s vanity.”

Armfield is fascinated by the “extraordinary trope” within the work when Prince Ramiro, performed right here by South Korean tenor Jihoon Son, modifications his costume with Dandini (Nicholas Lester).

“Imagine if one of the royals was able to get out of the straitjacket of constantly being in the spotlight and [escape] the warped human behaviour of fealty and obeisance,” he says. “In this way, he’s able to observe human behaviour.”

Rossini and Ferretti’s work lands “in a most delicious way,” concludes Armfield. “It’s Rossini at the height of his powers and his sense of fun.”

State Opera South Australia presents Cinderella (La Cenerentola) at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 7–16 May.