‘Rigoletto’ mixes love, sacrifice and sleaze

An elderly, handicapped father learns that his rich, powerful employer has seduced his 16-year-old daughter.

The employer’s friends kidnap the girl as revenge for the old man’s continual badmouthing them at parties – thinking she’s his mistress, not his daughter.

The father hires a hit man and his prostitute sister to murder the boss, but they kill the daughter by mistake.

This sleazy story seems modern enough for a newspaper’s front page, or to lead off the evening news. But it is the plot of one of the foremost masterpieces of opera, Giuseppe Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”

The Spokane Symphony will present “Rigoletto” at the Opera House on Friday in a production featuring Charles Robert Stephens in the title role as the Duke of Mantua’s hunchbacked jester; Eric Fennell as the Duke; Lambroula Pappas as Rigoletto’s daughter, Gilda; Dean Elzinga as the assassin-for-hire, Sparafucile; and Barbara Rearick as Sparafucile’s sister, Maddalena.

Music Director Eckart Preu will conduct. Jeffrey Sichel is the production’s stage director, and Andrew Hill is the stage and lighting designer.

“The story does sound awful in its bare outline,” Sichel said in an interview as rehearsals began Monday. “But this opera is really about love and sacrifice – Gilda’s love for her father and for the Duke. She’s willing to die, but for whom?”

For all its popularity, “Rigoletto” is not easy nor inexpensive to produce. Realistic sets would include scenes ranging from a lavish palace to a waterfront dive. And costumes would present characters ranging from splendidly dressed courtiers to a lowlife assassin and his seductive sister.

Overcoming those challenges for Friday’s performance is in the hands of Sichel and Hill, frequent collaborators who have worked together in opera as well as the theater.

Sichel is the head of the graduate theater program at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Hill is a freelance designer and lighting director whose productions with Sichel have been seen in cities from Shanghai to Moscow.

Both have worked before with Preu on opera productions including Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” Philip Glass’ “Les Enfants Terribles” and Schoenberg’s “Die Glückliche Hand.”

“We’ve been working and thinking about this production of ‘Rigoletto’ for more than a year to find what is really essential in this opera to make it work in the Spokane Opera House,” Sichel says. “How can we really reach the audience’s imagination and give them something they can wrap their minds around?”

That essence, he and Hill concluded, boils down to the interplay of light and shadow, color and gesture, to suggest the settings and get at the essence of the characters.

“What we are aiming for is a visually evocative production,” Sichel says, “that permits clear storytelling to an audience that is not made up of Italian speakers.”

Friday’s “Rigoletto” will be sung in the original Italian, with Sonya Friedman’s English supertitles projected above the stage.

“But we don’t want the audience to have to bob their heads up and down just to tell what’s going on,” Sichel says. “What we want to do is find the simplest visual means to allow Verdi to make his points.”

Adds Hill: “But simple is not simplistic. To make something simple and effective is one of the most difficult things in theater.”

Sichel’s and Hill’s productions make use great use of light projected on fabric, creating the moods of scene as different as the ballroom of the Duke’s palace and the waterfront hovel where Sparafucile and his sister intend to lure the Duke to his doom.

“For us,” Sichel says, “opera is the ultimate theatrical experience in which the words and the action are bound up in music.”

As for the soloists bringing those words and action to life, Fennell is a high tenor noted for his performances with the San Francisco Opera and New York City Opera.

Baritone Stephens, who has participated in several premieres at New York City’s Lincoln Center, is well-known as a performer of Bach and Handel as well as the traditional opera repertoire.

Canadian soprano Pappas, winner of the Metropolitan Opera auditions in Seattle, has sung coloratura roles with opera companies in Victoria and Montreal.

Elzinga is a bass-baritone who has performed at the Chautauqua Festival in upstate New York and opera companies throughout the United States. He is noted for his signature role as Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust.

Rearick, known to Spokane audiences for her performances at the Northwest Bach Festival, performs frequently in New York and in England.