Alcina

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ALCINA is Handel at his most emotionally profound and technically skilled both as a dramatist and a composer. This late opera takes the form of a “magic opera”, a form of which a younger Handel was a master and in which he had great success (most notably in ORLANDO or RINALDO), and which promised spectacle and an extreme of vocal, scenic, and orchestra effects. The original audience was in for a surprise when they entered the theater expecting to experience other-worldly wonder as they watched the well-known story of the island sorceress Alcina, first conceived by Ludovico Aristoso in the wildly popular epic Orlanda Furioso. Instead of a other-worldly spectacular they were offered a reflection of themselves, an uncannily perceptive psychological portrait of what it is to be human – to love unrequitedly, to hurt, to lie, to self-punish, to fail, to doubt – in a purported “magic opera”, in which no magic actually occurs. In fact, in a stunningly subversive act, the dramatic highpoint of the work to which all the dramatic energy surges is Alcina’s attempt to cast a spell in which her much lauded magical powers utterly desert her. There is no magic in this world. She is undone. She is also a profoundly important character in the history of opera. By convention, opera serie had to have a happy ending, a lieto fine, and indeed the ALCINA does end with the reunion of the central protagonists Ruggiero and Bradamante. This is incredibly deceptive on the part, however, of Handel. Handel invested what would be expected to be the antagonist of the opera, Alcina, with such depth of character and profoundly emotionally truthful music, that the line between protagonist and antagonist is impossibly obscured, indeed a reflection of the way real life works. There is no magic and truth is evasive and ephemeral. In this way Handel was creating the first truly anti-hero in the history of opera, a lead female character with remarkable agency, and whose downfall, while meant to be celebrated, is actually felt as loss by the audience. Handel has both upheld the convention and dashed to pieces.

This production seeks to fully illuminate this surprising and shocking aspect of what Handel was attempting to achieve – a theater of emotional truth, where magic does not exist, and feelings are raw and real. Focus is shifted from the affects and effects of the opera stage to the personal journeys of each individual character, given full dimension by Handel’s greatest opera score, and in this way the singing-actors are compelled and empowered to take personal ownership of the dramatic weight of the composition and the experience. Using the tools of Theatre of Cruelty and Theatre of the Absurd, this production seeks to expose the unique power of opera, particularly Baroque opera, to reveal ineffable emotional truths. The theater itself becomes metaphor for the Island, just as Shakespeare’s island become metaphor for theater in THE TEMPEST (and it should not be thought that this allusion is accidental, Shakespeare play in its rewritten form as “The Enchanted Island” was all the rage on the English stage at the time of Alcina’s composition). This production offers audiences a new and surprising way to experiencing and thinking about opera (as intimate, honest, visceral theater), and offers performers the rare experience of stripping their performance of artifice and trapping to instead explore the realness of Handel’s characterization through music.  In this way, an approach applied only and even then rarely to later opera, is applied in a wholly original way of conceiving and giving agency to Baroque opera, both for performers and audiences.