Dispensing with Cinderella’s glass slipper and reimagining her fairy godmother as a philosopher, Italian composer Gioachino Rossini and his librettist Jacopo Ferretti were “absolute geniuses”, enthuses opera director Neil Armfield. He marvels at how the pair flipped the script to encompass the magic of theatre and meta-storytelling, making the tale more recognisably human than pantomime.

La Cenerentola (Cinderella) premiered in Rome in 1817. The fairy godmother is replaced by a stage manager of sorts, a magical benefactor and the Prince’s former tutor known as Alidoro, played in the forthcoming State Opera South Australia production by bass Pelham Andrews.

Costume designs for State Opera South Australia’s new production of Rossini’s Cinderella. Image courtesy of designer Stephen Curtis

Alidoro’s humanist philosophy is that it is your qualities as a human being – not simply trying on new outfits pulled from a costume skip – that will see you succeed. As he sings in his aria, “The world is a vast theatre, and in the theatre, you can be whoever you want to be.”

In this production, Armfield and designer Stephen Curtis have placed Angelina (Cinderella), played by mezzo-soprano Anna Dowsley, in a milieu referencing the 1970s – the Dunstan decade of progressive law reform and increased state support for the arts in South Australia.

The newly released costume illustrations below offer a first glimpse into this retro reimagining and Curtis’s playful vision for the characters. The Seventies update also pays homage to the backstage teams Armfield and Curtis worked with on their earliest collaborations. Their first productions together took place in 1980 at what is now called the Dunstan Playhouse. In 1983, they staged Twelfth Night for the Adelaide Festival, which they subsequently made into a 1987 film.

“Whether you worked on the stage of the Festival Theatre or the Playhouse, there was this incredible crew of mechanics and stagehands that became family, working show after show,” Armfield recalls.

Neil Armfield. Photo © Shane Reid

He laughs at the memory. “They all had Seventies haircuts in the Eighties, and we thought that was such a wonderful, playful period. [Our] experiences were of this bunch of great men and women, who loved the theatre, who you could see backstage, focused on the work, and we wanted to dedicate this [Cinderella] to them, really.”

Armfield explains that commedia dell’arte, the classic Italian street-theatre movement through which Rossini filtered this opera buffa, would traditionally involve a group of players setting up in a town square, essentially needing only a curtain – hence this Cinderella will be presented in a simple space.

“Our set is just a floor, a curtain and a proscenium arch,” he says. “The wings are exposed. Rossini has this amazing chorus of men, who are presumably courtiers, to take us into new scenes and introduce us to characters. That group in our production will be our stagehands, who made theatre possible [for us] back in the Eighties.”

The cast includes bass-baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes – whom Armfield has previously directed in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – as the pompous Don Magnifico. New Zealand-born Tahu Rhodes made his Australian debut as the Prince’s servant Dandini in La Cenerentola for Opera Australia and played Don Magnifico for Victorian Opera in 2023. “He certainly brings a lifetime of discovery to the role,” says Armfield. “He’s not afraid to play with a character’s vanity.”

Armfield is fascinated by the “extraordinary trope” in the work when Prince Ramiro, played here by South Korean tenor Jihoon Son, changes his costume with Dandini (Nicholas Lester).

“Imagine if one of the royals was able to get out of the straitjacket of constantly being in the spotlight and [escape] the warped human behaviour of fealty and obeisance,” he says. “In this way, he’s able to observe human behaviour.”

Rossini and Ferretti’s work lands “in a most delicious way,” concludes Armfield. “It’s Rossini at the height of his powers and his sense of fun.”

State Opera South Australia presents Cinderella (La Cenerentola) at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 7–16 May.