After the Royal Opera House’s recent PLO flag debacle, I arrived at Italy’s Adriatic Coast feeling gloomy. I left feeling restored
August 19, 2025 15:15
Enjoying an aperitivo in Pesaro’s Piazza Lazzarini, I saw a commotion outside the historic opera house. As the crowd gathered for the opening of L’italiana in Algeri, one of the three productions at this year’s Rossini Opera Festival, I saw smoke rising and heard shouts. My heart sank: back home that usually means the Free Palestine mob has hijacked the evening.
We ran towards the commotion, only to find a Priscilla, Queen of the Desert-style campervan spilling a parade of drag queens into the opera house. This, I soon realised, was part of this year’s “queering” of the festival’s productions. My heart sank again, this time anticipating another weary dose of alphabet-soup woke activism.
I had arrived to Italy’s Adriatic Coast with a head full of gloom. Even enjoying beautiful places and art has become difficult for many since October 7. Opera provides a rare escape for me, never more so than at the Rossini Opera Festival. After the Royal Opera House’s recent PLO flag debacle, and its decision to cancel the transfer of Tosca to the Tel Aviv to appease a bunch of anti-Israel staff, I had hoped for just a few days to be somewhere less political, less hypocritical, less antisemitic.
Actually, though, director Rosetta Cucchi’s L’italiana in Algeri turned out to be tremendous fun even if you hate drag. Most surprisingly, whether by accident or design, it ended up being far sharper than much of today’s political theatre. Rossini’s rescue comedy tells the story of Mustafà, a sex-crazed Muslim despot in Algeria who cruelly rejects and discards his wife, and kidnaps a group of Italian women to become sex slaves. Cucchi reimagines the Italians as a troupe of drag performers, led by Daniela Barcellona’s Isabella, here a drag queen in sequins and feathers. Instead of the comedy of a feisty Italian lady teaching the barbaric Muslim tyrant a lesson in love, the opera is transformed into one of humiliation as he inadvertently falls for a woman “with a bonus”. Meanwhile, the hapless buffoon Taddeo is also trapped in Algeria hoping to return to Italy. Mustafá recruits him as a spy by appointing him “kaimakan” but his coronation ceremony has been utterly “queered” by Isabella who now has the entire troupe of Muslim soldiers dressed in pink. Crowned with a headpiece resembling a large plastic sex toy, Taddeo is now dressed in pink latex, as the chorus hails him “protector of the Muslims” in an utterly absurd display which thoroughly humiliates the Islamic mob, all set against a backdrop of RuPaul-level camp. Had the festival intended to mock the Islamic taking of sex slaves via an equally sharp skewering of LGBTQ high camp? Probably not. But Cucchi did so spectacularly, and I hope she has great security.
The irony was delicious. At a time when the Islamic world is still taking slaves and using sexual violence against them and others, much of the LGBTQ+ political movement absurdly aligns itself with the terrorist Islamists. So a production using camp caricature to ridicule a despot’s sexual tyranny over captured women is deliciously apt. Whatever Cucchi’s stated intention (“not to provoke” apparently), the effect was both provocative and cathartic – an operatic raspberry blown at the barbarism of forced concubinage, without ever losing its comic fizz.
Vocally, it was a feast: Barcellona sang with her trademark warmth and agility; Josh Lovell’s Lindoro was stylish and supple; Giorgi Manoshvili’s Mustafà mixed comic bluster with a rich bass tone. The drag artists, most new to opera, added texture and colour rather than distraction.
The festival’s other new production, Zelmira, was an altogether different creature. Staged in the round at the converted Auditorium Scavolini, Calixto Bieito placed the orchestra in full view in the centre, surrounded by Perspex panels, water, and a grave. Anastasia Bartoli gave a moving, flawless title performance, matched by Lawrence Brownlee’s effortless brilliance as Ilo — every coloratura phrase charged with physical energy.
The overall effect was visually spectacular, thematically astute, and intellectually stimulating. All of which helps in an opera with a distractingly complex plot.
After two such productions, Rossini’s youthful one-act farce La cambiale di matrimonio felt like a palate cleanser: charmingly staged, brightly sung, and without a whiff of politics.
In the end, my attempt to escape the world’s intrusions failed. But opera has always thrived on intrusion: it takes the mess of reality, distorts it, beautifies it, and hands it back to us in a form we can bear to contemplate. This year in Pesaro, comic and serious Rossini alike were reimagined in ways that make one think, and despite everything, restored a little of the delight I had come here to find.
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