Word: toscas
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...Lowell House Opera (LHO) production of “Tosca,” stage directed by Michael A. Yashinsky ’11, with music direction by Channing Yu ’93, sets Giacomo Puccini’s famously bloody tragedy in Fascist Rome—a good choice, since the political connotations are undoubtedly clearer to contemporary audiences than those of Napoleonic Rome, its original setting...
...from the very beginning, the slogan “Fascismo È Libertà” is projected brightly onto an angularly imperious archway. The villain Scarpia (Greg Cass) is dressed as a blackshirt, with oily hair and a thin mustache suggestive of Hitler. By the end, when Tosca not only takes the traditional suicidal plunge, but tears down a banner with the motto “Viva La Morte” with her, there can be no mistake: we are in Fascist times. Only Mussolini posters could have made the point more clearly in this production, which runs...
...slight overemphasis on the setting can be forgiven in an opera where oftentimes the stakes are unclear or hard to sympathize with. The moral gravity of life under a totalitarian régime refashions Floria Tosca (Michelle Trainor) as a heroine of freedom in the face of oppression, rather than the intemperate diva she is frequently made out to be in other productions. Scarpia is no longer merely cruel; he is now a Fascist and a racist, and therefore triply loathsome...
Whether LHO’s anti-Fascist Tosca is any more moving or convincing than the one driven by love alone is an odd and ultimately speculative judgment to make, like parsing the merits of a “Turandot” set during the Cultural Revolution, or a “La Bohème” in Vichy Paris. But LHO’s reinterpretation of this particular opera in the context of totalitarianism does bring out an aspect of the work that a production more focused on the stormy individualism of Tosca and Scarpia often overlooks...
Yashinsky says that the temporal and geographical shift of the opera has been an artistically liberating move. “If Tosca is in a panic, she can call her friend on the phone. It’s closer to real life, and that’s what this story is about: real people undergoing terribly real stories...