MassOpera will present Alcina by George Frideric Handel. Performances run June 27-29.
Alcina, spearheaded by Hannah Shanefield, director and Julian Gau, conductor, brings to life the timeless tale of true love triumphing over evil. The knight, Ruggiero, is captured by the alluring sorceress Alcina, who reigns over a magical island and has a nasty habit for turning her former lovers into beasts. Ruggiero’s fiancee, Bradamante, embarks on a journey to rescue her betrothed. Complete with complex love triangles, magic, hidden identities, and seduction, Handel’s Alcina is a vocal tour de force and dramatic masterpiece, sure to leave the audience spellbound.
MassOpera’s version of Alcina will explore the ideas of love, gender, and identity as spectrums. In modern performance practice, several of the historically male characters in Alcina are “pants roles,” or women playing men. In this production, the cast will perform their roles as the gender they identify with, making traditionally male characters in the opera female identifying. When speaking of the concept for Alcina, Director, Hannah Shanefield, emphasized that this change, “makes nearly every relationship in this show queer, and releases us from the binds of oppressive gender roles.” Shanefield’s vision for this opera is to “explore queer relationships in a magical and fantastical setting, focusing on heart rather than identity.”
To furnish the ensemble for Alcina, MassOpera launched the Community & Youth Ensemble (CYE), a music educational program that includes community avocational singers and youth in their mainstage productions. The CYE program is centered on creating a space to engage and encourage musical and performance growth. In its inaugural season, the CYE program has sixteen participants.
In keeping with its guiding principle, “To ensure gender parity both on-stage and off,” MassOpera’s Alcina is composed of mainly female identifying performers ensuring multiple talented female identifying singers in the opera profession have performance opportunities.
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