Friends, plough­men and coun­try­men, you’re invited to the Elixir of Love, NZ Opera’s utterly mad­cap new cre­ation.

Though my com­pan­ion and I were likely the young­est and the poorest in the audi­ence (opera con­tin­ues to be an art form seem­ingly gran­ted to those above a cer­tain age), it was a show that could be enjoyed by all.

This opera is a tale for the ages. Our hero, Nemorino, is des­per­ately in love with the beau­ti­ful Adina, but she can’t find time for him and instead decides to wed Bel­core, a ridicu­lous Eng­lish officer. How­ever, Nemorino buys a ‘love potion’ off snake-oil sales­man Dul­ca­mara and is sure that that will change Adina’s heart. Over a ridicu­lous two and a half hours, the pair fall in love and dis­cov­er that although the ‘potion’ may not be real, their love and the drink’s great taste and fla­vour cer­tainly is.

(Pos­sibly sponsored by Coca-Cola.)

One part I espe­cially loved about this opera was the incred­ible com­mit­ment to the aes­thet­ic. It’s set (some­what) in early Aus­tralia, and the set, cos­tumes and over­all pro­duc­tion design was utterly gor­geous and ground­break­ing.

Dir­ect­or Simon Phil­lips writes, “My instinct is always to bring some­thing as close to home as the scen­ario will allow. This (Aus­trali­an) set­ting allowed me and my design­ers to draw on some of the aes­thet­ics of both the real Aus­trali­an land­scape and its depic­tion in art. As you can see in the pho­tos above, the use of cor­rug­ated iron – or some­thing sim­il­ar – runs through­out the entirety of the show, with­in the set, the horses (!!!) and oth­er phys­ic­al ele­ments. It’s a bril­liant and innov­at­ive way to set us, as audi­ence mem­bers, with­in the scene.

Hav­ing nev­er been to the opera before, I was­n’t quite sure what to expect. The entire piece was in Itali­an (Gaetano Don­iz­etti’s L’el­isir d’amore) and an Eng­lish trans­la­tion was played on a screen to the side of the stage. As this opera was set in Aus­tralia, it was quite the unique trans­la­tion, indeed – nev­er have I ever seen the word ‘bonza’ used in a sen­tence before, and I don’t think I ever will again.

The entire opera was per­formed beau­ti­fully. An aria I espe­cially loved was Come Par­ide vezzo­so, per­formed by Bel­core, where he tries to woo Adina, hil­ari­ously, and she rebukes his advances. Bel­core is a weird char­ac­ter any­way, quite big­head and rather ridicu­lous, and I found him to be a lot of fun.

Major kudos to the leads of this work, Amina Edris (Adina), Pene Pati (Nemorino), Mor­gan Pearse (Bel­core), Con­al Coad (Dul­ca­mara) and Nata­sha Wilson (Gian­netta) for car­ry­ing this piece so thor­oughly.

Although ini­tially I did feel like I would­n’t quite fit with­in the world of this dif­fer­ent art form, at the end I felt wel­comed in with open arms. There is some­thing to be said about let­ting go of pre­con­ceived notions around cer­tain things, and I did have a hil­ari­ous time in the end.

The entire work was utterly witty and charm­ing and def­in­itely worth see­ing live on stage.

Take a chance, have a gamble, I’m sure you’ll have a very good time.

 

The Elixir of Love is being per­formed at Wellington’s Opera House on the 26th, 28th and 30th of June. A wide range of tick­ets are avail­able here. 

Show is per­formed in Itali­an with Eng­lish sub­titles.

(Quotes abridged for length.)

(Images cour­tesy of NZ Opera and Simon Watts, bwmedia.co.nz)