Opera News: The Barber of Seville Review

Opera News

Opera Omaha's fifty-eighth season opened on October 14 with Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia in a staging by Michael Shell that was hilariously delightful with every random turn. Set in Spain during the Seville Fair, the highly stylized production, previously seen in Philadelphia and Saint Louis, is more like a Mexican comic variety show than the Almodóvar films that supposedly inspired it; the staging featured high-energy fun with a string of random events and characters. There was a clown on stilts aptly placed for Figaro’s “una la volta,” a bumbling chorus, cross-dressers, naughty nuns, and the obligatory randomly appearing chicken.