The (Little) Magic Flute - Mozart
Opera theatre company's The (Little) Magic Flute is a version of Mozart's opera intended for young and old alike. The eight-venue, 13-performance tour is travelling the country in tandem with educational workshops to prepare young ears for what is likely to be their first serious encounter with the world of opera.
At the Pavilion Theatre, D·n Laoghaire, last Tuesday night, a young presence behind me voiced appreciation of the glowing orange square revealed onstage as the lights dimmed. And rustles of concern and involvement from the younger members of the audience continued to make themselves felt throughout the evening.
Gavin Quinn's production, of Andrew Synnott's not quite Mozartian-sounding reduction for a cast of six and an instrumental ensemble of five (violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano), quickly sorts out the good characters from the bad and highlights the presence of John Milne's benign Sarastro as a sort of elevated clerical puller of puppet-strings.
Joe Corbett plays Papageno as a cute but not really smart culchie, with only a few feathers in a cage to vouch for his calling as a bird-catcher.
Eugene Ginty's forced singing as Tamino rather loses sympathy for him, but he sounds altogether more appropriate as the malicious Monostatos.
SinΘad Campbell's white-clad Pamina has a quiet radiance, and within the musical scale of the production she offers singing of high musical intelligence and wide-ranging vocal expression. She certainly aims to impress as a woman any prince would undergo trials for.
Nicola Sharkey handles the vocal acrobatics of the Queen of the Night with aplomb, and Victoria Massey's crabbed old hag effectively lights up Papageno's life by her transformation into the true Papagena.
Andrew Clancy's set - a tilted white screen, a square of boxes lit in changing patterns and a frame with four, translucent, bubbled panels through which characters can enter and exit - keeps the visual interest lively, and Suzanne Cave's modern-day costumes carry their messages about the characters' relative standing quite clearly.
