La finta giardiniera
Director's Notes

Early Mozart is a beast unto itself. The recitatives reference the earlier Baroque period and are very long. The set pieces are three to four verses and have very little variation and what variation they do have is so subtle that it is almost imperceptible. That complaining done, it is early Mozart! The musical and dramatic energy is through the roof and doing it with young artists makes not only good sense but fits the energy of the piece perfectly. There are dramatic holes here and there but that just adds to the rather surreal quality of the piece, a feeling of nothing making total sense. The end of Act II has a group collective nervous breakdown which takes several of the characters half of Act III to recover from.

 

The characters are very entertaining: a Countess working as a fake gardener, hiding from the world as she recovers from the trauma of her fiancé stabbing her; her faithful servant working as her assistant in the garden and who is also in love with the mouthy maid, who is in love with the Mayor. The Mayor owns the estate and is in love with the fake gardener. Then there is the niece of the Mayor who is a borderline dominatrix but who is actually deeply vulnerable and needy. Her character is complimented by her ex-fiancé who she mistreated badly and unceremoniously dumped. Finally, there is the Count, the former fiancé of the Countess/fake gardener who he stabbed in an unwarranted jealous rage and who, by sheer happenstance, has come to the Mayor’s estate to marry the dominatrix niece. Confused? It takes awhile to figure out.

 

To help support this surreal environment, we are drawing inspiration from the genius work of Federico Fellini. His movies always had a not-quite-real edge to them, where the characters became intertwined in a confusing circus of emotional overkill. Like most of Fellini’s films, the production remains black and white until the finale of Act II when the characters become involved in each others’ personal crises. At that point we go to a psychedelic, bright and colorful landscape, both in set and costumes, anticipating the period immediately following the peak of Fellini’s genre. The characters remain in this vivid environment as they come to some clarity about themselves and their relationships to each other.

 

I am blessed that I have the brilliant designers Takeshi Kata and Kate Schaaf as co-set designers, the ingenious Elena Flores designing costumes, and our longtime friend and lighting designer David Jacques creating lighting magic. I am deeply grateful to all of them for embracing the concept for this production and bringing it to such vivid life.

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—Ken Cazan