Gaetano Donizetti: Le Convenienze ed Inconvenienze Teatrali
O’Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford
★★★★☆
The title of Donizetti’s Le Convenienze ed Inconvenienze Teatrali translates as The Conventions and Inconveniences of the Stage. The work began life as a farce with spoken dialogue in Neapolitan dialect before being transformed into a full-length opera with recitatives.
Like all of the main productions at this year’s Wexford Festival Opera, the plot is about a show within a show, this time about a malfunctioning opera company trying, and failing, to keep the show on the road.
The story sets out to expose the feuds, rivalries, enmities and jealousies that fuel the behind-the-scenes power struggles in a world where, for a performer, rank is everything. The prima donna and seconda donna live in different professional worlds, each defined by the specific terms of their contracts. When the singers squabble you’re in the realm of the kind of “news” that muckraking websites pursue about celebrities to this day.
Family loyalties are to the fore in the opera’s conflicts; the big player here is Mamma Agata, the manipulative helicopter mother of the seconda donna, a role Donizetti wrote for baritone. Think of all the special incongruities of Lady Bracknell in Gerald Barry’s operatic version of The Importance of Being Earnest and you’ll be on the right lines.
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Paolo Bordogna has nailed the role. His Donna Agata Scannagalli is vain, incompetent, oblivious to her shortcomings, utterly fearless whatever the challenge – including ballet as well as notes well outside her vocal range. Under Orpha Phelan’s lively direction and in Madeleine Boyd’s consistently amusing costumes, he exceeds every and any expectation, and carries all the challenges off with a wonderful sense of do-or-die.
Everyone else on stage in the strong cast is a kind of satellite to Agata, even the prima donna Daria Garbinati, sung by the excellent Sharleen Joynt. Early on she does some wonderful hand semaphoring to indicate her struggles with what she has to sing. And she later engages in high-wire acrobatic delights in her suitcase aria, Leonard Bernstein’s Glitter and Be Gay – suitcase arias were singers’ preferred showcases, which they took from production to production for insertion whenever they wanted to show themselves at their very best.
The seconda donna, Luigia Castragetti (Paola Leoci) may have less to sing, but she does get to show a warmer, more rounded tone that whets the appetite for more. Alberto Robert impresses, too, as the stray German tenor who has found himself in the wrong production.
The production is gag-rich (where else would you see a singer get wrapped in plastic and carried off prone and shoulder-high?), though some of the corny pelvic-thrust jokes of Amy Share-Kissiov, who has choreographed the piece, go on rather too long. Danila Grassi conducts with sympathetic warmth and with well-judged balance between stage and pit.
Le Convenienze ed Inconvenienze Teatrali is at Wexford Festival Opera on Friday, October 25th, Monday, October 28th, and Saturday, November 2nd
