Falstaff at Arts Centre Melbourne State Theatre

Dates: (12/1/2014 - 12/11/2014 )

Theatre:

Arts Centre Melbourne State Theatre

100 St Kilda Rd
Melbourne,Victoria VIC 3004

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Phone: 61300 182 183

Running Time: Approx two hours and fifty minutes including two twenty-minute intervals.

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Cast Creative Edit

Verdi wrote Falstaff at the ripe old age of 77, and he brought to it a lifetime of stagecraft and a profound love of Shakespeare. He had already taken inspiration from Macbeth and Otello, and toyed with the idea of creating an opera based on King Lear, but he had never tried Shakespearean comedy. It was to be his final masterpiece.

Unusually for Verdi, the music drives the action along scarcely pausing for arias, but instead binding the words and music together in a tight-knit web.

“There’s no fat on the bone,” says Phillips. “It’s just effortless music-making.”

For a great piece of comic writing, you need a great comedian, and this production has one in Warwick Fyfe. He’s won fans as Mozart’s soft-hearted Papageno and guffaws as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, but Falstaff is his biggest challenge yet. Not least because he has to wear a fat suit and calf-enhancers, plus a full face of hair to look the part.

“Whenever they get the glue pot out I start cringing,” moans Fyfe of the lengthy transformation, in hair and make-up, from a forty-something Australian to an elderly, ruddy-nosed knight.

But it’s worth it when he appears on stage in all his grubby magnificence, ready to revel in Verdi’s glorious score. The jokes fly, the fairies dance and the music captures the emotions that words alone miss. Shakespeare would have loved it.

Authors

James Plasted Webber

Cast and Creative team for Falstaff at Arts Centre Melbourne State Theatre

Conductor Christian Badea
Director Simon Phillips
Set Designer Iain Aitken
Costume Designer Tracy Grant Lord
Lighting Designer Nick Schlieper

Falstaff Warwick Fyfe
Alice Ford Amelia Farrugia
Ford Michael Honeyman
Nanette Taryn Fiebig
Fenton Jonathan Abernethy
Mistress Quickly Dominica Matthews
Meg Page Jacqueline Dark
Dr Caius Graeme Macfarlane
Bardolfo Kanen Breen
Pistola Jud Arthur

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