In 1851, the first performance of Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Rigoletto" was given in Venice.
Clearly this wasn't the "Rigoletto" that played at the Met 841 previous times over 129 years.
Susan Hilferty's costumes had the Duke looking dashing, Rigoletto frumpy and Gilda girlish.
While nearly all the Duke's buddies watch stone-faced as Rigoletto pleads, Marullo alone is disgusted, turns away and hangs his head.
Meanwhile, in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "Rigoletto, " running through May 1, the second act takes place in and around a strip club.
Rigoletto's biting humor is lost in the extravaganza, to some extent evaporating that plotline and the reason for the anger of the Duke's toadies.
Damrau's triumph, coming on the heels of her splendid Gilda in Verdi's "Rigoletto" last month, solidifies her position as one of the Met's most important stars.
Rigoletto, the Duke's court jester in Piave's libretto, is transformed by Mayer into a hanger-on and comic along the lines of Don Rickles and Joey Bishop.
Zeljko Lucic let loose a fierce and pained baritone as Rigoletto, combining with Damrau for an unforgettable second-act duet filled with emotion, inflection and even tears.
Domingo has also made more than fifty music videos in addition to four feature films of operas: Carmen, La Traviata, Otello and Tosca, with the Mantua Rigoletto forthcoming.
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The locale of "Rigoletto" changed even before its first performance in 1851 Francesco Maria Piave adapted the libretto from an 1832 Victor Hugo play set in France, but objections by censors led to the shift to Italy.
Rigoletto is a nasty, Don Rickles-style comedian, the Duke's lapdog, alternately encouraged and kicked, whose mockery of Monterone (here, a sheik), whose daughter has been raped by the Duke, comes back to haunt him when his own daughter, Gilda, is taken and destroyed.
The staging settles down after that, with a few silhouetted palm trees in green and gold, enabling the basic story to come through: the kidnapping of Gilda by an entourage mistaking her for Rigoletto's mistress, the lecherous Duke's rape of Gilda, her unwavering crush and her father's quest for revenge.
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