Westmont Magazine Music, Theater Double Our Opera Pleasure

With great imagination and flair, Westmont’s music and theater arts departments presented two one-act Italian operas updated with contemporary sensibility. Audiences witnessed two wildly different comic stories and musical styles: Gioachino Rossini’s “The Marriage Contract” and Giaocomo Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi.”

John Blondell, professor of theater arts and stage director, and Michael Shasberger, Adams professor of music and worship who directed the play’s music, built off their recent successes with “The Pirates of Penzance,” “Dido and Aeneas,” “Die Fledermaus” and “The Magic Flute.” 

“Puccini wrote ‘Gianni Schicchi’ as part of a trilogy of stories that included a tragedy and a drama,” Shasberger says. “Our pairing put two of the most engaging comic, one-act operas together from two of the greatest operatic composers of all time, Rossini and Puccini. It’s fascinating how both composers deal with the challenges of true love and the tension between avarice and virtue. The operas are about 100 years apart in musical style, so it was exciting to hear the singers working in very different styles of storytelling.” 

 “As we dove into these shows, we asked questions of the material that I have been obsessed with for more than 30 years,” Blondell says. “What is theater? What is contemporary theater? What is a living theater? What do we do with old stories? Should we keep telling them? Why? How? Both these stories emerge from times very different from our own and mean different things today than they once did. In both cases, we pulled apart these operas and reimagined them for contemporary circumstances, questions and points of view. We crashed the worlds of the present into the worlds of the past. The stagings were meant to elicit responses, prompt questions and provide opportunities for conversation and debate. The theater—isn’t it great!”