LA PIZZA CON FUNGHI AND LE VILLI
New Opera Singapore
Victoria Theatre
Saturday (23 August 2025)
This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 August 2025 with the title "A delightful double bill of light and dark operas".
Love, vendettas and death are the lifeblood of operas. Take them out, and all the music and dramatics fall flat. New Opera Singapore’s (NOS) double bill of two vastly contrasting hour-long operas, directed by Jeong Ae Ree and conducted by Chan Wei Shing, had loads of these and some more.
Opening the evening was the dark comic opera La Pizza Con Funghi (1988) by American composer Seymour Barab (1921-2014), a coup from left of field. Sung in English and filled with all the favourite tropes and stereotypes of Italian opera, it was a laugh-a-minute affair reminiscent of NOS’s opera comique farces from years past.
Voluptua (sung by soprano Lara Tan), who is having an affair with Scorpio (tenor Shaun Lee), plots to kill her husband Count Formaggio (baritone Edward Kim) by poisoning his favourite mushroom pizza (hence the Italian title).
However, her maid Phobia (mezzosoprano Rebecca Chellappah) switches the toxin and has Scorpio offed instead. This sets off a chain reaction of murders, where everyone takes forever to sing “Ah, You Have Killed Me” before they actually die. That is not before a consanguineous relationship between the two dying men is finally revealed.
What worked best here were the comedic timing and dysfunctional chemistry between the characters. This was aided by their whitened faces (masking their true colours) and a funky all-pink set design by RT+Q Architects that turned red at the very end. This opera is a little gem that deserved to be better-known.
Very different was Giacomo Puccini’s first opera Le Villi (The Fairies, 1884), which was as serious as Pizza was hilarious. Despite its unevenness, there were telling hints of Puccini’s full-blown lyricism and future greatness. This also featured the evening’s strongest singers backed by the 18-member NOS Chorus, in white face paint and led by Dawn Yin, which shone just as brightly.
Roberto (tenor Nomher Nival) pledges his faith to his betrothed Anna (soprano Zhang Jie) before he leaves town to seek his fortune. Predictably, he strays and squanders the wealth, and Anna dies during childbirth. Her father Guglielmo (baritone Min Seung Kang) curses him to a worse fate. The eponymous Fairies, sung by the chorus, avenge women who die from abandonment by fatally haunting their fallen men.
The opera’s two acts play like day and night. Act One proffered hope and happiness with clear and light shades with the villagers singing their blessings. By contrast, Act Two was dark and murky, achieved with excellent lighting design by Alberta Wileo, with the chorus now in black outfits and ushering in impending doom.
Overwrought acting now ruled, giving a new meaning to melodramatic. Roberto is contrite but ghost Anna and the Fairies are unforgiving, leading to an airing of the opera’s best-known music, the orgiastic La Tregenda (The Spectre) before a frenzied and fatal conclusion.
With this success and its warm audience reception, the intrepid New Opera Singapore is now encouraged to explore next the single-act operas of Sergei Rachmaninov.
Photography by Chris P.Lim
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