Florentine’s ‘La Mamma’ Was Frothy Fun

Florentine Opera Company’s “Viva La Mamma.” Photo by Nathaniel Schardin.

This past weekend the Florentine Opera Company offered wonderful light-hearted experience with comic opera staged at Alverno College’s Pitman Theater – Gaetano Donizetti’s freshly cobbled together 18^th century bel canto spoof and its outrageous characters in Viva La Mamma.

The plot is about a community opera company with an overly high opinion of itself. Among them is the egotistical prima donna, her adoring husband, an impresario who drinks and a stagehand who pounds nails at inopportune moments.

They are torn apart by a thunderous stage mother who demands a duet for her daughter (known in those times as the “second donna” to differentiate her from the prima donna). In the process this barking stage mother (a baritone in drag) chews an Italian sub, berates the audience and yells at everyone. She (or he in matronly suit and giant wig) drives away the mezzo and the German addled tenor. (An inside joke is that while both operas are sung in Italian, the English supertitles convey the language garbles of the tenor along with some other wry interactions.)

Lest you ever thought the Florentine Opera too grandiose and serious, here it was inventive and invigorating. It was also offering a rare opportunity for Milwaukeeans to applaud one of the high talents in opera, Metropolitan Opera veteran Patrick Carfizzi. His bass-baritone also does well with more traditional grand opera dramas, but here we got a double dose of his explosive comic personalities, both as a self-centered conducting maestro in a curtain opener show and then returning as the frightening and buffoonish stage mother dragon of all time in Viva La Mamma.

I suspect that without Carfizzi we would never have gotten this double bill and all the fun that comes with it. The 20-minute opener was from a slightly earlier contemporary of Donizetti – Domenico Cimarosa, whose Il Maestro di Cappella plays marvelously with all the lovely bel canto orchestrations and trills while Carfizzi as the priggish maestro insists that the orchestra do just as he commands – oboes and violas just so and can’t those damn trumpets shut up when he tells them to!

The large chamber orchestra was drawn from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. And the players and music director Anthony Barrese (who at one point changed places with the maestro) had great rapport playing back and forth with the lyric commandments and the actual lively music.

The timing suggests some improvisation though they all knew just what to do. Barrese stood out in both operas as knowing how to convey interplay, which is quite special. Sometimes in opera you feel that the orchestra knows where it is going regardless of the singers. Here they all traded instructions in tune, a constant reminder that you can spoof opera as long as you know what you are doing. There is skill involved in such deliberate excess.

Donizetti’s 90 minute one-act was not just taken off some shelf, but was a production benefitting from modern scholarly insight and crafty discovery of how to make fun within music and even within costuming.

The audience would have learned more about that could they have heard more distinctly the interchange between Florentine CEO Maggey Oplinger and stage director Jill Anna Ponasik, who has emerged as the ultimate collaborator for companies seeking to enliven classical music.

Their 20-minute repartee onstage during intermission to break apart the two operas brought the rare wish from an opera fan for some miking. Both spoke loudly but the Pitman is a 1,000-seat theater and during the break the audience did visit the lobby for such things as food and talk. That noise was in combat with the conversation. So it was hard to focus on the snippets of backstage lore and intense pursuit of stylistic moments they were discussing.

Ponasik’s staging of the production showed both humor and connectivity in hammering, page waving and group interaction, at one point using a three-quarters closed curtain as a mood and costume changer, with performers amusingly yelling back and forth while we can only see their legs. She also understood the commentary possibilities within the music.

Carfizzi thrived in drag and out, turning the Italian reliance on hand gestures into an art form. He moved nimbly and comedically – and that high and low voice! His bass baritone ranged into falsetto and doublespeak. His sense of operatic rhythm commanded the stage, yet he interacted superbly with others.

Some of the humor depended on familiarity with opera conventions, particularly when large groups are singing toward us and the plotting is fuzzed up with the traditions of dramma giocoso — humorous drama, an operatic genre common in the early 18th century.

But all this required singing gloriously and yet spoofing opera at top volume. That was the aim and success of Alisa Jordheim as the vain prima donna, over-glorifying and mugging bel canto riffs while spearing us with the power of her soprano.

Spencer Reichman showed us what a bass baritone can do staying away from the falsetto and gravel effects that Carfizzi employs. In a large cast that must joke around with opera types and sing with flourish, there were notable moments hard to single out in a review, so busy are the stage antics and deliberate repetitions. But there was nice work from Aaron Agulay, Bill McMurray and Jerek Fernández, the last having some impish fun as the German tenor.

In my memory this is the first time the Florentine has used the Pitman Theater. It may prove a possible space for future Florentine use. It has good acoustics and sightlines even though it is much used by Alverno as an auditorium.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.