Don Bucefalo. A note from the director.

I am thrilled to be returning to Wexford this fall to direct Don Bucefalo. My design team and I have had a blast putting this show together. For us, this farcical opera is about the power of theatre and music and the way it can bring a community together. At once hilarious and heartfelt, the opera tells the story of the arrival of a music aficionado who convinces members of a rural community that they have the talent to put on a legitimate theatrical performance. We decided to update the production from a vaguely 19th century landscape to the 1980's and ’90s of our childhood. As a team, we were inspired by the 1996 cult-classic mok-u-mentary Waiting for Guffman and the classic 1957 American musical (and subsequent 1962 film) The Music Man. The arrival of Don Bucefelo galvanizes this small Italian town and serves as the catalyst for a slew of competitive artistic and romantic entanglements.  Without giving too much away, we decided to set the entire opera in a multi-purpose community center – the kind of facility found in every small town, complete with a stage, a small cafe, a basketball hoop, stacks of multipurpose chairs and a wide variety of sporting, theatrical, musical and town-meeting accessories. Our community is trapped in time. The clothing, color scheme, scenery and practical lighting are vaguely mid-1990’s. There are no cell phones or lap tops, nor is there anything to indicate a specific year. Rather, we have a general sense that time has left this town behind. 

I grew up in a small city in Maine and we had a recreational center just like this. I rehearsed plays and musicals in multi-purpose centers for my entire childhood, so this space feels very real to me. (In fact, I actually starred as Harold Hill in The Music Man when I was a senior in high-school. Rest assured, now I leave the singing and acting up to the professionals!) The update has proven quite seamless. For instance, a harpsichord becomes a Casio keyboard (I had one of those, too!) and the "singing peasants" become amateur actors rehearsing a play about peasants – complete with homemade costumes and two-dimensional scenery. Like the communities in Waiting for Guffman and The Music Man, our cast of characters starts to believe that their show might really make them famous. This approach feels especially appropriate for the Wexford Festival which began as a big community effort and continues to foster this sense of community today. (I am sure there have even been a few farcical moments, intentional or unintentional, in the Festival's history!) We hope that this approach will bring out the comedy of the story and continually bring us back to the theme of the power of music and theatre to bring a community together, no matter how delusional these characters' belief in their own talent may be.

Kevin Newbury

August 2014