If last night’s opening performance of La bella dormente nel bosco is any indication of how audiences at this year’s Spoleto Festival will react, then you’d better grab your tickets right now.And I mean now, as in this morning. ‘Cause otherwise, I’d say you can forget about getting into this one. La bella is without question one of the most charming, flat-out entertaining productions Spoleto’s put up in recent years; director and chief puppeteer Basil Twist has outdone himself — and, if he’s not careful, pretty much everyone else in the festival to this point. I’m still hearing extraordinary things about Don Giovanni, but I’m here to tell you: it’s got its work cut out for it if it expects to create a bigger sensation that La bella dormente.
Twist’s puppets are a marvel. Sleeping Beauty’s tale is familiar to most of us in the audience, but what this production brings to that story is infinitely greater than the tale itself. The life-sized puppets do things you wouldn’t believe marionettes could do. This is still an opera, with the black-robed singers standing off to the side of the action on stage or on the puppeteers’ catwalk above it. And often we see the puppeteers themselves, either manipulating the strings of the marionettes or, more directly, moving the arms, legs and head of a puppet (whether person, or cat or a singing spindle). At times, the stage is so thick with strings it looks almost like rain. At one point I counted no less than 26 puppets cavorting across the stage. That’s a lot of puppets, my friend. And every one of them is magic .
