Director’s Notes
by Director Yefim Maizel

Rossini’s masterpiece The Italian Girl in Algiers, is a blend of comedy, exotic fantasy, and reality. We decided to re-create the original opera experience for (almost) 21st century audiences by using the vehicle of the tongue-in-cheek “adventure story.”
In the genre of adventure stories, the intriguing possibilities for danger, mystery, and romance seem boundless. Writers of adventure create a striking backdrop of landscape and architecture and vividly show us the unusual customs and behaviour of the native inhabitants. Yet these stories are not pure fantasies, but contain enough reality to make them believable, and thus all the more exciting.

Some of the best adventure stories also tease us by occasionally pointing out the absurdity of the situation, as if the writer is living out his or her fantasies and making rent money at the same time. The experience of being both lost in the story yet conscious of the humor in the process of telling it is what we wanted to create in this West Bay Opera production. The Italian Girl in Algiers is ultimately a comedy, an adventure comedy set to brilliant music, so our production is conscious of itself and at the same time a parody of a genre.

We set the story in the 1920s, for that was an era when Americans were as fascinated with all things European as Mustafà is fascinated with all things Italian.