Preview: Rigoletto at Opera in the Heights

Hurt people hurt people.

Director Alyssa Weathersby has been reminding the cast of the Opera in the Heights production of Verdi’s classic Rigoletto of that as they rehearse for their production opening this week.

The opera begins with the hunchbacked jester Rigoletto hurling insults at the fathers and husbands in the Duke’s court and who is, in turn, despised by the men for making a joke of the seduction of their wives and daughters by Rigoletto’s employer.

Rigoletto hurts his own daughter Gilda by keeping her sequestered in his house and unprepared for the outside world, Weathersby points out. And when Gilda finally gets out and meets serial seducer, the Duke, only bad things can and do happen.

In turn, the Duke is an island, Weathersby says, surrounded by noblemen who resent and hate him. Raised in neglect, the Duke “is a source of poison” for everyone he comes in contact with. “Everybody in the show is dealing with hurt in their own way,” the director says.

All of this hurt, of course, is surrounded by some of the most strikingly beautiful music in any opera (“La donna è mobile.”) Artistic Director Eiki Isomura, who as usual will conduct the orchestra, says he’d love to do Rigoletto at any time and was fortunate to find singers who can do the music justice.

“I think that there’s a sort of dark intensity to especially Rigoletto’s climatic aria Cortigiani where he’s pushed to the edge and he’s shaming these courtiers but also begging for their pity. It’s so striking how Verdi goes from this rage that is sustained and keeps building and building until it becomes this very tender and pathetic plea for mercy,” Isomura says. “The emotional turns the piece takes making everything feel continuous, original and organic. It’s very remarkable especially at this stage in Verdi’s career when it’s still his middle period but he’s begun to try some things to break out of a conventional formula in building a scene.”

All of which means, the role of Rigoletto is a challenging one for singing and acting, Isomura says.

“[Rigoletto] is a role that has to carry a lot of vocal power and emotional range and stamina. It’s the sort of role that can be hard to cast with singers at an earlier stage of their career. So we have someone in Nathan Matticks who specializes in these Verdi roles.”

The character Rigoletto is far from a one-note.

“It’s this character that at the beginning of the opera we are given many reasons to actively dislike this person and through this opera we as an audience we experience this funny feeling of developing sympathy for a character we think of as cruel,” Isomura says. “It takes a really insightful performer to be able to tap into the darker aspects of the character, almost sadistic parts of that character but also to be able to access that pure, fatherly love that has to be 100 percent believable in order for all of the heartbreak in the piece to really communicate to the audience.”

The other two main characters are the lecherous Duke and Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter

“In the Duke we have Alex Boyer who for this role is a bigger voice. He has more of a dramatic edge to his vocal production. His sound itself is just very exciting,” Isomura says. “I know that he’s going to blow the roof off Lambert Hall. His voice is really that powerful. And he also has Gilda to access the more tender moments. He has a number of arias and one of them is surprisingly sentimental and seemingly sincere and so he’s able to do both.:

“For Gilda we have someone who’s a genuine coloratura soprano. And Catherine [Goode] she really can dazzle and melt hearts with what she can do with the vocal pyrotechnics,” he says. .

“Gilda has this tricky task of making us believe that she would sacrifice her life for someone who has hurt her. But if it’s just that she just young and naïve so of course she would do that — well that’s not an interesting portrayal. We have to believe that it’s a struggle and that she’s really thought about this and it’s not just a whim of youthful, foolish love which would feel two dimensional. Catherine is a very deep artist who is able to tap into what sort of psychology drives someone to do this. Catherine’s been bringing a lot of life to this character.”

Weathersby, a soprano who continues to perform as a singer, was also a dancer early on with an interest in choreography that made a natural progression to directing. Isomura describes her involvement in this production as a “godsend.”

“She’s someone who has really done it all even though she’s quite young. She’s had kind of parallel paths of being an opera singer, stage director and choreographer. She also works for companies doing intimacy directing and stage combat choreography. She does all of those things at the highest level,” he explains.

“For Rigoletto especially her skill set is such a godsend because it is a very physical staging. There are abductions. There’s a murder. There’s a lot of carrying poor Gilda around whether alive or dying. And then there is this lecherous Duke character who is making advances on every female character on the stage. Someone who has experience in intimacy direction, who’s trained in that has been really helpful in running rehearsals in a safe and ethical way.”

Weathersby herself says her varied experience has helped her direct this production.

“I know how to effectively translate what I need. The more important thing is that I treat people with respect and that goes a long long way. I see cast members, crew members as people first. You’re under tight pressures, timelines and it’s so easy for folks to treat cast members and crew as pieces of the whole and not as people,”

She was part of a production of Rigoletto in college but has never directed it before. In this production she’s trying to avoid the tropes that sometimes productions of the classic fall into — that by emphasizing Rigoletto’s physical deformity it reassures the audience “that is not us.

“I’m focusing more on the humanity of this rather than just the spectacle.”

The reason Gilda stands out, Weathersby says, “is because the cycle of hurt does end with her. And it’s a little bleak that to end it that she accepts all of the violence and all of the hurt. and ultimately dies. There’s a reason we like her. A lot of people struggle with ‘Oh why is she so dumb. Why is she so silly in making these choices?’ And the reason is she’s doing the best she can within the framework and society structure that her dad created around her, that her governess, her maid put around her.”

“She had every right to push against those boundaries.”

Performances are scheduled for March 25, 26, 31 and April 2 at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sundays at Lambert Hall, 1703 Heights Boulevard. Sung in Italian with English surtitles. For more information, call 713-861-5303 or visit operaintheheights.org. $42.50-$87.50. (Senior and student discounts available.)