Inhumane Clown Posse

From The Stranger.

“Most stagings of Pagliacci depict Canio as a heartbroken clown driven to do horrible, murderous things because of his cheating wife, who is his everything. You may have seen iconic images or video recordings of opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti crying as he dons his clown makeup when playing Canio as one such example of this sympathetic slant (listen to the rapturous and positive applause at the end of his aria!).

With those shortcomings in mind, Director Dan Wallace Miller’s version of the opera situates Canio, Nedda, and the other performers in Italy in 1947. Artistically inspired by Italian neo-realist films, especially those of Vittorio de Sica, Miller’s setting for Pagliacci is an attempt to place as much weight on characters’ interiority as on their desperate socioeconomic conditions. Miller said these efforts frame ‘the awful thing that happens at the end… in an even more tragic light’ by highlighting the circumstances and decisions that push Canio to murder; the director took other adaptational liberties to cast Canio as a more clearly antagonistic figure. In his version, Canio is more plainly an alcoholic, and Nedda has a black eye from Canio’s physical abuse.

‘I don't have an interest in prettying up or denying the abuse that happens in a narrative like this, I think it needs to be expressed. But I do have a vested interest in examining where sympathies need to lie, and showing that the expectations of who you need to suture yourself to and align yourself to in this narrative are way different now than they were 100 years ago,’ Miller said. ‘That, I hope, is reflected and comes through quite strongly and in a way that… if audiences come to see it now, they'll just think this is exactly how the piece was always done.’”

Read here.