By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK
The evening began before the curtain rose. In the darkened Benedum Center, only the orchestra pit was lit—and the reflected glow reached softly up to the theater’s ornate ceiling, as if the music were already illuminating the space from below. Conductor Antony Walker’s baton rose, and Giuseppe Verdi’s overture began to pull the everyday world out from under us. By the time the curtain finally opened, we were already somewhere else.
The production’s visual world, designed by John Conklin, operates through a logic of concealment and revelation. Three large volumes dominate the stage—wooden structures painted with a crumpled-paper texture, their surfaces transformed by precisely mapped projections that layer Renaissance-inflected imagery onto the material—figures in Renaissance poses, at times a single figure emerging from the wall as if stepping out of a Cinquecento painting. The production’s visual intelligence lies in the interplay between this stylized scenic world and Victoria Tzykun’s costumes, richly layered, with fabrics and silhouettes that evoke the period while carrying their own theatrical invention.
The scenic volumes move only between scenes, never in view: their reconfiguration happens in the dark, as if the world itself were rearranging while we weren’t watching. Gaps between the scenic volumes create a vocabulary of thresholds: spaces for entries, half-seen gestures, and the glimpsed and partially revealed. The elevated positions atop the volumes serve a different but related function: from there, figures watch without being watched, surveillance written into the architecture itself. A semitransparent scrim at the proscenium adds another layer of spatial depth, used to particularly striking effect to isolate Rigoletto in moments of solitude. High above the action, upstage and elevated, a small architectural model of a piazza remains lit throughout the evening—a constant reminder that the court’s world of power and predation surrounds and ultimately penetrates whatever refuge Rigoletto has tried to build. The lighting design by Robert Wierzel takes bold risks: many scenes are bathed in saturated monochromatic light that privileges atmosphere over volume and contrast, creating an almost painterly quality, though occasionally at the cost of the costumes’ chromatic richness, and once or twice at the cost of Gilda’s face, lost in shadow at moments when we most needed to see it.
Verdi’s casting of voice types is never accidental, and in Rigoletto it functions as a moral map of the drama. The Duke of Mantua, sung by tenor Daniel O’Hearn, inhabits the upper register with ease—his bright, agile voice carrying the character’s charm, his fanfarronade, the weightless confidence of unchecked power. The bass Peter Volpe as Sparafucile occupies the opposite extreme: a voice of penetrating darkness, cold and unhurried, in which villainy finds its natural home.
Between them, baritone Sebastian Catana as Rigoletto carries the evening’s dramatic weight—a voice of resilience and despair in equal measure, steady through the gathering catastrophe, a father holding himself together by sheer force of will. And then there is Susanne Burgess as Gilda. More than once I found myself open-mouthed. Her voice combines precision and power in a way that makes the character’s complexity fully audible: we fall for the Duke alongside her, suffer her violation, laugh at her comic moments, and are moved, again and again, by the sheer force of what she produces. Gilda is perhaps the evening’s most relatable character, and Burgess gives her everything she deserves.
Revival associate stage director Elio Bucky’s movement direction is one of the production’s quiet strengths. The choral scenes are rigorously choreographed, and the direction makes conscious use of stylization; unafraid of theatrical convention, it lets bodies become compositional elements rather than merely functional presences. Formations recur throughout the evening: a long file of figures lining the stage, a tableau deep upstage. At the same time, dramatic action unfolds downstage, a single body breaking from stillness while the rest hold. This is not a chorus of neutral observers. These courtiers laugh at Rigoletto’s cruelties, participate in Gilda’s abduction, and remain complicit in the Duke’s predatory world. Their beauty as a collective body exists in tension with what that body does, and the production, to its credit, never lets us forget it. That same precision extends to the fight choreography and intimacy direction by Tonya R. Lynn—never gratuitous, embracing the stylization that theatrical language both permits and demands, without simplifying or diminishing what is at stake.
The production’s command of theatrical convention is nowhere more evident than in the Act III scene in which Rigoletto brings Gilda to witness the Duke’s faithlessness. Father and daughter share the proscenium while the Duke pursues Maddalena inside. Yet, through lighting alone, without the scrim, the production creates an absolute spatial cleavage: the Duke cannot see them, and we understand this completely. No explanation is needed. The theatrical convention does its work, and the result is quietly devastating: we watch Gilda—just a few feet from the action, yet entirely elsewhere—unable to intervene as the person she deeply loves betrays everything.
The production’s most audacious theatrical gesture, however, arrives in its final moments. Throughout the evening, the scenic volumes have defined and contained the playing space, creating rooms, thresholds, zones of privacy and danger. We have never seen what lies behind them. Then, as Rigoletto cradles his dying daughter and the tragedy completes itself, the volumes are removed for the first time, out of our sight. A larger space is revealed; still contained within the black box, but suddenly vast by contrast with everything that came before: three tall walls, fortress-like, enclosing an empty expanse that reads simultaneously as public square and private ruin. Rigoletto walks upstage alone, diminished by the sudden enormity of the space around him. The gesture lasts less than a minute. But it earns every second: the revelation of the stage is also the revelation of Rigoletto’s interior—a man who spent the entire opera trying to keep the world of the court—its predations, its power, its contaminating reach—away from the one thing he loved, now left with nothing but its full, indifferent expanse.
Rigoletto began as a scandal. Verdi’s opera is based on Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, which premiered in Paris in 1832 and was banned after its first performance for its politically provocative portrayal of a debauched king. When Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave adapted the play nearly two decades later, censorship forced them to relocate the action and replace the king with a duke. Still, the story retained its unsettling core: a ruler’s sexual predation, a court complicit in his abuses, and a father whose own cruelty and complicity do not diminish the devastation of his loss. Hugo had articulated a related aesthetic principle in the preface to Cromwell (1827), a landmark of French Romantic drama, arguing for the fusion of the grotesque and the sublime, the comic and the tragic. In Rigoletto, these opposites inhabit the same body. Rigoletto is deformed, cruel, complicit, and also a father of devastating tenderness. That contradiction is not a flaw in the drama; it is the drama.
This production honors that complexity. What we witness is not a story of villains and victims but of human beings caught in a system that distributes harm unevenly—and that protects, above all, the powerful, which brings us to the Duke. At the opera’s end, after Gilda has unwittingly sacrificed herself and Rigoletto has understood the full weight of his loss, the Duke is heard in the distance, blithely singing his signature tune, La donna è mobile, as if nothing has happened. Because for him, nothing has. He walks away. He always does. Verdi gives him the catchiest melody in the opera and lets him sing it twice, and then lets him disappear, unscathed and unaware. Nearly two centuries later, that final sequence still stings because so much of what the opera anatomizes remains unchanged: the powerful walk away, the vulnerable pay the price, and the catchiest tune belongs to the man who caused it all. That is why the tragedy lands as hard as it does. Verdi knew exactly what he was doing.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Pittsburgh Opera’s production of Rigoletto is at the Benedum Center with a remaining performance on October 18, 2026.Tickets at: https://trustarts.org/production/105760/rigoletto
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose practice moves between criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
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