It was nearly 10 years ago that Five College Opera presented its last full production — but now, it’s back.
Five College Opera will present “The Marriage of Figaro” (“Le Nozze di Figaro”) on Friday, Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 8 at 3 p.m. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Bowker Auditorium. The show will be sung in Italian with English supertitles.
“We’re very excited to embark on this journey,” said Jamie-Rose Guarrine, professor of voice and interim associate chair of the UMass Department of Music and Dance. “We started rehearsals this week, and the students are super psyched.”
Five College Opera, as its name suggests, is a collaboration in which faculty members from the Five Colleges come together to produce an opera that music and theater students from those colleges can perform in. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the collaboration produced a show every three years. Its last one, presented in September 2017 at Smith College, was “The Scarlet Professor” by Eric Sawyer and Harley Erdman, an opera about then-closeted Smith professor Newton Arvin, whose 1960 arrest for possessing gay erotica upended his life.
The pandemic put Five College Opera’s work on hold until last year, when faculty members gathered in a steering committee to discuss show options, budgets and other logistical considerations for this upcoming production, which unlike “The Scarlet Professor” will feature an all-student cast.
The group chose “Figaro” out of a number of other operas in part because the show is part of the classical opera canon, which means it would give the student performers “something that had longevity for their careers, a repertoire that they could take with them,” Guarrine said.
Stage Director Melanie Bacaling (who was not part of the steering committee) agreed: “[Mozart] writes so, so brilliantly for the voice that it’s really good for establishing and developing technique. … It’s a really great foundation of discovery.”
“It’s such a gift for them to be able to do this particular opera in this stage of their artistry,” she added, “because it is a challenging opera. There’s a lot of Italian in it; there’s a lot of tricky plot points; there can be a lot of physicality in the staging.” Rather than having “a higher-stakes professional level where there can be a lot more pressure,” Bacaling appreciates that the cast has the chance to explore the show “in a workshopping way when we’re able to play together.”
The steering committee also wanted an opera with plenty of roles for women, given the two women’s colleges in the Five College Consortium, and “Figaro” fit the bill.
“The fact that [Susanna] is the main woman scheming to make all the plot happen was really historically significant at the time,” Bacaling said, “and the fact that it’s an opera where where you have female characters who have a robust sense of autonomy is very exciting, instead of it being about the woman dying at the end, as a lot of operas are.”
Once the group had chosen “Figaro,” they gave the cast the option of performing an English translation of the libretto rather than the original Italian version — and the students said no.
“Even the non-majors were like, ‘Oh, no, I want the challenge!’” Guarrine said. “Because our Five College kids, they’re smart! They’re driven and smart, and they took that challenge, and now they get to reap the benefits.”
The opera is about two servants, Figaro and Susanna, who are in love and are trying to get married — which isn’t easy, considering their (married) boss, Count Almaviva, is scheming to exercise “droit du seigneur,” his “right” to sleep with Susanna.
Bacaling noted that the show has particular relevance to the current political climate: “It’s a timeless tale of a man in power who decides to bend the rules of the land for his own game,” she said, “and I think that that is something that we are all looking at and dealing with right now.”
Guarrine wants this production to provide “a scaffolding” that guides future Five College Opera productions — perhaps they could put on a show every other year instead of every three years, or maybe they could produce a more intimate chamber opera rather than a large show.
“We are trying to think outside the box, have a 21st-century approach to production, and our students’ pedagogical needs are at the forefront,” she said, “so I think that’s the point of this endeavor. It’s building something from that. [After the pandemic], we’re kind of starting over.”
In any case, she said, “The response in the community to ‘Marriage of Figaro’ — I was like, ‘Oh, we picked the right show! People are really excited!’ In the dark winter, the cold winter, you wish that you could have a comedy of beautiful music and a love story, so it couldn’t be a better night in the theater.”
Tickets to “The Marriage of Figaro” are $27 for adults, $22 for Five College faculty and staff, $22 for seniors age 65 and up, and free for students at the Fine Arts Center box office, by calling 413-545-2511, and at umasstix.org/musicanddance.