Juan Hernández as Nemorino and Brittany Smith as Adina. PICTURE: Annène van Eeden
Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (The elixir of love) is being presented by Cape Town Opera at Theatre on The Bay from Thursday October 13 to Sunday October 16.
Artistic director Magdalene Minnaar says after Cape Town Opera's joyful production of Le nozze di Figaro, the team decided to forge on with another comic opera as an antidote to the misery of Covid-19.
“We want to offer our audiences colour, jokes and glorious melodies.”
She adds that among these melodies are arias so popular that they will be familiar even to those who do not regularly follow opera.
“In our version of Elisir, we have created an Escher-esque dream world in which Adina is tested by the mad scientist and ‘encyclopedic doctor’ Dulcamara. He is an alchemist with a Frankensteinian flair for ingenious chemistry, which he uses to bend the rules of chance, thereby sculpting an alternate reality as a human experiment. Like Spalanzani in Les contes d’Hoffmann with his mechanical doll or a more modern-day Circe, he sends Adina into this alternate realm where two contrasting love prospects test her: the sweet and slightly average Nemorino and pompous, presumptuous Belcore.”
The cast features Puerto Rican tenor Juan Hernández as Nemorino, Brittany Smith as Adina, Conroy Scott as Doctor Dulcamara, Van Wyk Venter as Belcore and Linda Nteleza as Giannetta.
Tickets cost from R220 to R290. Book through Computicket.