Wahoo Production

A judge is called upon to judge a crime of which he is the guilty party. This case of conscience, whether or not to confess his crime, is the pretext for many improbable acts of boorishness, a ferocious spectacle of human relations, unbearable to watch... if laughter were not there to detach us from it.

In the 60s, in the heart of a village, Robert lives with his mother Odette. About fifty, balding, paunchy, Robert spends most of his time locked in the garage where he tries to develop a teleport machine. Robert will try to teleport himself, but a fly is stuck in the machine, and the scientific apprentice will gradually turn into a giant insect. Robert will little by little dehumanize to become a beast able to climb the wall, pushed by an insatiable search for food.

“Everyone steals according to one’s position in society.” A social critique, a credo to live by, and a recipe for the hilarious satire of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Brigands! The Opéra Comique’s rollicking 2011 production took full advantage of the talents of stage directors Macha Makeïeff and Jérôme Deschamps (members of the wildly successful French comedy troupe Les Deschiens) and the accomplished music director François-Xavier Roth.

A staging of Pierre Corneille's play "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme" by Denis Podalydès.

Like Handel’s Orlando (1732) and Ariodante (1734), Alcina derives from the narrative material in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. The story of the sorceress Alcina, an initially hedonistic, manipulative woman who later finds herself a victim of love, fits into the genre of the ‘magical opera’ with numerous magical elements, but Handel achieved considerable emotional authenticity in his characterisations. This makes Alcina one of the most deeply felt and multifaceted operas. ‘You may despise what you like ; but you cannot contradict Handel,’ said the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. As in Tamerlano, Pierre Audi based this production on the stage at the baroque theatre at Drottningholm, for which he originally developed the directing concept. His set is thus based on the principles of perspective, with wings in the form of painted panels. The result is marvellous modern musical theatre in a historizing frame.

Performed at Madrid's historic Teatro Real in 2018, Ivor Bolton conducts Benjamin Britten's opera based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. In her repeated clashes with the Earl of Essex-a longtime favorite of the queen who was ultimately put to death for treason-Elizabeth I is depicted as flawed and vain, human and sympathetic.