No Score
Festival Theatre
Right, I’ll level with you from the start: there’s no star rating at the bottom of this one. We didn’t see the whole thing. We walked. Escaped, more accurately. So consider this less a review and more an incident report.
Verdi’s A Masked Ball, courtesy of Zurich Opera as part of the Anderson Opera Series, is a handsome production on paper. Gianandrea Noseda conducting, Adele Thomas directing, the whole thing transplanted from its usual Sweden or Boston setting into a Gilded Age fever dream of champagne, secrets and impending doom. The Festival Theatre stage looked the part too. Genuinely gorgeous staging, full of atmosphere, the kind of thing that makes you think you’re in for a treat.
And then the singing started, and somewhere between the fortune tellers and the political intrigue, Bryan and I just… didn’t go with it. It’s hard to pin down exactly why. The visuals were doing all the work and the music wasn’t meeting us halfway. I’ll hold my hands up and confess I got a solid twenty minutes of sleep in the first half, which is never a great sign for an opera that’s meant to be dripping with desire and treachery.
Interval arrived and so did our traditional interval drink and ice cream, and somewhere between the two Kinghorn got called. That’s our code word for bailing on a show, and honestly it was one of the easier Kinghorns we’ve ever made. No agonising, no “shall we give it one more scene”, just a shared look, a shrug, and a decision made before the ice cream was even finished.
So that’s it. No stars, because it feels wrong to score a show I only watched half of. Just an honest shrug and an acknowledgment that not every night at the Festival is going to be a hit for us. Staging was lovely. The rest of it just wasn’t our opera.
You win some, you lose some.