Berkeley Opera's 2001 season is called "Opera Uncensored," and the shtick
is to offer the "Marriage of Figaro" based on an "actual production at
the Paris Opera shortly after the Revolution, supervised by Beaumarchais
himself...  [restoring] much of Beaumarchais's original dialogue to the
story, putting back the satire and subversion that delighted and
scandalized a continent."

OK, but how do you do a Left-Coast "Carmen"? Leave it to David Scott Marley
(who should really make excitement happen with a larger organization -
maybe the Met?) and you'll get the un-revised Paris version of "this story
of the passion between a gypsy who lives and loves by her own rules and a
soldier hiding from a violent past shocked Paris with its frank sexual
psychology and its refusal to pass judgment on its characters -- in an era
when gypsies were despised and condemned throughout Europe." [Frankly, I am
violently shocked myself that anybody in Berkeley would not use the correct
Roma terminology!]

Anyhow, check out http://www.berkeleyopera.com/berkop/01.html

Janos Gereben/SF, CA
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