The Illusion of Happiness

It came as something of a surprise to find The Marriage of Figaro described in an advertisement for the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production as a ‘happily-ever-after classic’. While few would contest the opera’s ‘classic’ status, its conspicuously tidy denouement – marriages upheld, misunderstandings corrected – is only barely able to conceal the rich seam of cynicism running through the action. Indeed it is the very promise of future unhappiness lurking beneath the final ensemble – an eternal continuation of the battle between the sexes that so delighted Lorenzo da Ponte – that unchains Figaro from the conventions of eighteenth-century comedy and gives it a flavour of the universal.

Yet the Lyric opera’s highly traditional new production – directed by Barbara Gaines of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater – seems to have taken da Ponte’s…