Sophisticated composer John Musto and witty lyricist Mark Campbell have done it again. Their highly anticipated comic opera, “The Inspector,” is about to open at the Barns of Wolf Trap. This comedy of errors built upon greed, graft and mistaken identity is Wolf Trap Opera’s second commission, both created by the Musto-Campbell team. After the success of “Volpone,” that first collaboration whose recording received a Grammy nomination, Musto and Campbell wrote “Later the Same Evening,” a jazz-infused opera inspired by five Edward Hopper paintings for the National Gallery of Art and the University of Maryland Opera Theater. Their third opera, “Bastianello,” was based on folk tales. It celebrated the 20th anniversary of the New York Festival of Song, where Musto’s concert songs receive frequent performances, and was followed by a Wolf Trap Opera Company production in 2010 with a cast of WTOC alumni.
Campbell explained the team’s decision to reimagine “The Government Inspector” by Nicolai Gogol, a play that delighted Czar Nicholas I for its satirizing of human greed and political corruption. The new setting is a small Sicilian town populated by scheming politicians who await a bureaucratic inspector dispatched by Mussolini.
| Onstage |
| ‘The Inspector’ |
| Where: The Barns at Wolf Trap |
| When: 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 3 p.m. May 1 |
| Info: $32 to $72; 877-WOLFTRAP (965-3872); wolftrap.org |
“Ours is not an adaptation of the play, but goes way off because all opera has to have dire life-and-death circumstances,” he said. “John didn’t want to write a Russian opera, so I began scouting about for a time of large bureaucratic rule and rising power. Having spent a month in Sicily, I thought the Mussolini regime, the period between 1925 and 1930, was the perfect setting. Besides, John leans toward Italian music.”
Musto talked about the creation process he and Campbell go through that always includes two workshops.
“I must like all the characters, whether they are evil, misguided or pure,” he said. “The styles I use in ‘The Inspector’ are varied. For the daughter, I wrote an elegant, tuneful aria as she muses about the strangers in town. Her mother, Sarelda, sings a very Venetian aria imagining what life will be like when they get to Rome. I lean rather heavily on Italian dance forms and accompany the Inspector with a lively tarantella.
“This show is all the more enjoyable because we’re working with the original team for ‘Volpone’ and ‘Later the Same Evening,’ including director Leon Major, set designer Erhard Rom, costume designer David O. Roberts, lighting specialist Bob Grimes and Glen Cortese in the pit. Our take on ‘The Inspector’ is a whole lot funnier than Gogol’s, and by setting it during Mussolini’s regime, we’ve upped the ante.”
