Puccini delightfully retold as a domestic soap opera
Puccini’s hour-long masterpiece Gianni Schicchi is the only wholly comic opera he wrote, but its performance opportunities have always been limited by its awkward length. It’s very short for an entire evening, so it needs to be paired with either of the two other operas in Puccini’s Il Trittico, or given as part of the whole triptych, which is rather long.
Now Grange Park Opera, as part of its pandemic-based activities, has given it a new lease of life with an online film that stands on its own as a clever and entertaining piece of domestic soap opera. The setting may be a corner of Chelsea in modern London rather than Puccini’s Florence of 1299 (which appears only fleetingly on a mobile phone), but the scenario fits neatly.
Buoso Donati, here getting ready for his birthday, dies suddenly, and the relatives gathering for his party arrive to find him expired.
They become very anxious about the contents of his will, and after a scramble around the house to find the document, they realise that he has given his money away to the local monastery (not sure where that is in Chelsea), and hatch a plot to get a bigger share for themselves.
Stephen Medcalf ’s film makes skilful use of the rooms of the smart house (with a few operatic allusions in the costume designs on the bedroom walls), and, though there is some idiocy with whoopee cushions and a sweet but superfluous dog, the music is excellently projected and convincingly dubbed by a top-notch set of British singers. It has all been recorded, filmed and edited in a couple of months: a very sophisticated piece of work.
At the centre of the ruse is William Dazeley’s workman Gianni Schicchi, brought in to re-dictate Donati’s will from his bed, who turns the tables on the greedy relatives and leaves the house and the money to himself. Younger and more vigorous than most Schicchis of today (the composer says he should be 50), Dazeley is acerbic and witty, and in this version he doesn’t even conceal himself behind the usual four-poster curtains to wreak his revenge; the lawyer obediently taps on his laptop while sitting on Schicchi’s bed.
This is above all an ensemble opera. The women (Alish Tynan, Sara Fulgoni and Jessica Costelloe) are competitive as they divest Schicchi of his worker clothes to prepare for bed, while the men (Jeremy White, Alan Ewing, Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, Lorcan Buckley, Emyr Wyn Jones) join them as a looming ensemble gathered on the elegant staircase.
Luis Gomes and Chloe Morgan provide the love interest, and Morgan is touching in the opera’s one moment of repose in the aria “O mio babbino caro”, which she sings through a door to her reluctant father Schicchi.
Something has to be lost in this recreation, and without an orchestra I thought I would miss Puccini’s sophisticated instrumentation, but Chris Hopkins’s piano captures much of the ingenuity and energy of the cleverly patterned score.
As an hour of pure fun this is hard to beat, as well as a tribute to the inventive resilience of Grange Park Opera.