The rejuvenated San Diego Opera’s ambitious 2025-26 season continues this weekend with The Barber of Seville, Rossini’s precision-engineered romp about a clever count (Almaviva) who resourcefully steals the heart of a rebellious heiress (Rosina) from a blustering martinet (Dr. Bartolo) with the help of a scheming barber (Figaro).
With its surgically efficient plot and gold-standard bel canto roles, the 1816 work is understandably among the ten most frequently staged operas worldwide.
But if you’re tempted to wait for the next inevitable production of this repertory staple, consider not only the San Diego Opera’s quality cast — youthful veterans with emerging international careers – but also the New York-based director making his local premiere, Chuck Hudson.
A veteran of America’s best regional opera companies with a reputation for comic opera and developing singers’ as actors, Hudson was a shrewd choice to help local favorite mezzo-soprano Stephanie Doche (as the spirited Rosina) synergize with two rising talents making San Diego debuts: baritone Dean Murphy (as the wily Figaro) and tenor Minghao Liu (as the ardent Count Almaviva).
If there’s a typical career path into a career directing opera, Hudson doesn’t have it. A competitive gymnast as a kid, Hudson’s natural physicality met life-changing inspiration when at age five or six, he watched legendary French mime artist Marcel Marceau do his iconic “chasing butterflies” mime on television. Speaking from his San Diego hotel eleven days before the Feb. 13 opening night, Hudson readily identifies Marceau’s magic:
“He could play the same production all over the world to various countries, to various levels of status in the audience, and they all laughed at the same time, hushed at the same time, cried at the same time,” Hudson said. “He would be sharing something on a different level than simply showing you physically what was going on.
The street mimes you see on the street are based on him, but they are doing physical illusions. When Marceau was trapped in a box, it wasn’t about showing the box, it was the theme of claustrophobia or being trapped by society. Marceau’s piece about chasing a butterfly is about chasing your dreams. He wanted to do all of these psychological things–without props and without costumes–so it universalized his work.”
Hudson transitioned from Marceau admirer to Marceau mentee while earning his bachelor’s in theater at the University of Houston. Joining a movement theater company led by Marceau student and Olympic fencer Claude Caux, Hudson’s rehearsal performance so impressed the visiting Marceau that he invited Hudson to enroll in his École Intérnationale de Mimodrame de Paris.
“The very first day in Marceau’s school, ‘chasing butterflies’ was the piece of his we were studying,” Hudson recalled. “Just being on the first day in his school with that kind of ‘circle of life’ happening was really wonderful for me. The theater right next to his school was famous from the boulevard theater days.
“One afternoon he invited me into the theater, and said, ‘Just go stand out in the middle of the stage.’ When I did, he said, ‘I want you to know that the character role of Cyrano de Bergerac was born on this stage.’ He knew that was one of my favorite plays. He had this very sort of paternal thing artistically with me. It was a genuine apprenticeship.”
One of only three Americans among 40-45 first-years in Marceau’s three-year program, Hudson became one of only six who ultimately earned diplomas authorizing them to teach Marceau’s technique internationally. Bigger honors followed: a teaching assistantship with Marceau at the University of Michigan, a full professorship at École Marceau and invitations to perform with Marceau in Klaus Kinski’s film Paganini and then to join Marceau’s three-person troupe for two years of international touring.
“We had a wonderful time being on the road with him. You’re in a train with Marcel Marceau, who’s telling you about when he was working with the Berliner Ensemble with Bertolt Brecht or was one of the few people at Montgomery Clift’s funeral! The stories he could tell were amazing,” Hudson recalled.
After returning from Paris to University of Houston to lead its physical theater training program, Hudson moved to Seattle with some of his students to co-found Immediate Theater. Seeing one of his productions, the Seattle Opera invited Hudson to lead its new program to train young singers to be more physically active and truthful in performance. “That’s how my directing of opera happened,” said Hudson.
But what exactly does mime — the “art of silence” — have to do with the very unquiet Barber of Seville? Everything, it turns out.
“The things that I’m bringing to this show are the things that Marceau taught us,” Hudson stated flatly. “The Marcel Marceau comic timing exercise is something I do with every comedy that I’ve ever directed. He has a very specific physical exercise that I did with the entire San Diego cast the first night of rehearsal to get them into that his style: universal human behavior that communicates what it is to be a human being and to have human relationships.
“That’s definitely something that I like to put in my shows, so audiences are not constantly relying on the super titles. They can watch the human behavior and figure out what’s going on.”
Barber of Seville was the first opera Hudson ever directed for a large company, Minnesota Opera in 2001. Though Hudson reprised the opera there with last spring, his San Diego ‘Barber’ is no retread revival.
“I’ve moved the production from the late 1700s when it’s normally set to the 1820s when the opera [established itself],” Hudson explained. “So, it’s still a period-style production, but it’s very specific to the comedies of the 1820s that were based on the Italian commedia dell’arte theater I studied in France.”
Not at all coincidentally, that commedia dell’arte theater — featuring archetypal comic characters with stock names and functions, costumes and masks, and acting styles (including pantomime) — had inspired Marcel Marceau’s iconic white-face “Bip the Clown,” a twentieth-century take on the commedia dell’arte character Pierrot.
“The style that I’m trying to bring to [San Diego Opera’s 1820s-set production] is based on how commedia dell’arte moved into the nineteenth-century performance style,” Hudson said. For example, in modern productions of Barber characters’ spoken asides to the audience — a defining feature of the commedia dell’arte upon which Rossini’s opera buffa is based — are usually internalized to create the so-called fourth wall of nineteenth-century drama. Hudson’s Barber’will collapse that wall, as Rossini did.
“We’ll introduce lots of asides to the audience just like they would when Barber was performed for the first time,” Hudson confirmed. “This ‘presentationalism’ — sharing everything with the audience — is something that’s very specific to what I’m bringing to this production. The audience gets to be ‘in’ on the various characters’ plots, which the other characters are not aware of.”
Allowing the San Diego audience to anticipate other characters’ surprise intensifies the opera’s comic sizzle while more directly connecting the opera to its roots — which directly shaped the mime tradition Hudson learned from Marceau.
Supporting Hudson’s new approach will be a brand-new visual set developed by the Opera’s Tim Wallace (scenic design), Jason Bieber (lighting design), and Mathew LeFebvre (costume design). But innovations aside, Hudson acknowledges that Barber’s core appeal hasn’t changed in 210 years.
“The music is something that almost everybody recognizes, especially the overture,” Hudson explained. “It’s the music from Bugs Bunny that we all remember from the Rabbit of Seville [Warner Bros. Looney Tunes, 1950]. The music has been likened to champagne. It’s light, it’s bubbly, it’s effervescent. That’s what we think about when we think about Rossini.
“So, the style of comedy has to go along with that. Slapstick, for me, doesn’t work with Rossini, because slapstick is the beer of comedy. Light, as in the work of Charlie Chaplin, works perfectly with Barber. That’s the style that I’m trying to bring to it. The show itself is one of the funniest ever written. It’s rare to get really funny comic operas, not just one that ends happily, but makes you laugh. But how you get those laughs is very specific to me.”
Which brings Hudson and the San Diego audience back to the universalized emotional truth of Marceau’s mime. When Hudson is not directing opera or theater, he’s teaching master classes and privately coaching singers to become better actors.
“What got me into opera to begin with is people saying, ‘We want this [emotionally truthful acting] in the opera world’. But, 20-something years later, there’s still no unified approach to operatic acting,” he said. “If singers start feeling things emotionally in a realistic or naturalistic way, they’re going to start to breathe too high; it’s going to close down their voice.
“They cannot feel that emotional state really and sing correctly, properly. So, singers need to present the dramatic truth of it through acting. Their physical behavior and acting behavior, not their feeling, has to be in the same world of the opera’s dramatic truth. The feeling is what the audience is going to get.”
Though this weekend’s Barber is Hudson’s first project in San Diego, his experience with many of the troupe’s members will help him get that feeling across. The opera’s resident conductor/chorus master, Bruce Stasyna, was the chorus master on Hudson’s first major Barber in Minnesota a quarter century ago. He’s also worked with bass/baritones Craig Colclough (Don Basilio) and Patrick Carfizzi (Dr. Bartolo) before.
“Having people like Craig and Patrick, we already have that ‘shorthand’ — the best way to support singers and direct them in the short amount of time we have [to prepare],” he said. Which again closes the circle linking Hudson and Marceau.
“One of the reasons I did this comic exercise of Marceau with the entire company is to instantly create that shorthand so I could just say, ‘This is a word I’m going to use to direct you rather than [having to] tell you what to do now. Let me direct you with this vocabulary which will stimulate your own creativity’.”
Happily, ‘Barber’s ubiquity in opera companies’ repertory means most of the San Diego Opera’s singers have some kind of Barber shorthand, if not initially the shorthand of Hudson’s Marceau-inspired conception. But Hudson reports comfortable tailwinds.
“It’s going really smoothly,” he said. “San Diego Opera and I have been chatting with one another for a long time. COVID set things back, but it was wonderful to pick that conversation with San Diego back up and do my first show here. San Diego is a great company to bring in people whose names you recognize, but also to introduce you to people that you may not recognize as an audience member, but are fantastic artists.”
