Class warfare and the battle of sexes broke out in Fort Worth Saturday night—at least onstage at Bass Performance Hall, where the Fort Worth Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro held up to the audience a cold, clear mirror of human folly.

Dissatisfaction was already smoldering across Europe when Pierre Beaumarchais wrote his play Le Mariage de Figaro, a not-so-thinly-veiled attack on the aristocracy, in 1781. Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, clearly sensed the inevitable fall of the eighteenth-century social order when they borrowed Beaumarchais’ lust-driven, folly-prone characters for their opera in 1786—less than a decade before the storm of revolution would send crowns toppling and hierarchies crumbling across Europe.

One is tempted to speculate that in this production, director Eric Einhorn has been pushed the setting up to, say, 1791 or 1792, and that the news of barricades and guillotines has somehow slipped through to this idyllic, isolated world. The servants seem coolly aware that the game is almost up for their aristocratic masters. Although there’s a clear sense of social disorder embedded in the text, Einhorn subtly takes that element up a level with body language and a tightening of space between the singers.



-- Wayne Lee Gay, D Magazine's FrontRow

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