The Marriage of Figaro

Writing a few years before the French Revolution, barely concealing himself in his hero, Beaumarchais pours his class rage into a stock-comic vessel that barely contains it under pressure

Three years after the happy ending of The Barber of Seville, it's the valet's turn to marry

But his master the Count has tired of his lovely Countess, and lusts for Figaro's bride-to-be, Suzanne

He determines to revive the ancient droit de seigneur - the lord of the manor's right to bed her

Figaro and the women concoct a counter-plot - the Count's page, Cherubin (Mozart's Cerubino) makes hash of it through his passionate crush on the Countess

The double/triple/quadruple misunderstanding yields one of the most perfect farce scenes of all time, featuring a chair and a closet, and one of the finest master-servant scenes, featuring a razor

The play - as great in its kind as the opera Mozart made from it - proclaims Figaro a better man than the Count and the women better humans than the men

This version restores two revolutionary passages that the author cut to save his liberty - a confrontation between the Count and his vassals in the final scene that anticipates the guillotine, and a searing indictment of sexual inequality by Figaro's mother, Marceline

REVIEWS

"For the sprightly new American Conservatory Theater production ... credit must go to translator/adaptor Joan Holden for sending new shafts of light through the play. The characters, especially the women, seem freshly inspired in their resourcefulness ... vernacular that might have been coined yesterday" ~ San Francisco Chronicle