Emiliano Suárez triumphs in his vision of Don Pasquale at ABAO
October 23rd, 2024
After the premiere on October 19 of the production of Don Pasquale at ABAO, the press has highlighted the excellent work done by stage director Emiliano Suárez and his team. Thus, the magazine Ópera Actual highlights: “The new production signed by Emiliano Suárez for ABAO Bilbao Opera moves away from commedia dell'arte and traditional stereotypes to update this work, bringing it to a timeless actuality.The staging was well conceived, setting the action in a small family hotel business, with Don Pasquale as the owner of a pizzeria, Malatesta as a sort of manager, and Ernesto and Norina as employees. The plot did not suffer at all with this approach, well executed [...] Suarez's proposal stood out for its freshness and cinematic airs.”
Platea Magazine talks about his directing work: “Emiliano Suárez's scenic proposal moves the action to a pizzeria of which Don Pasquale turns out to be the miserly owner. His nephew Ernesto is a somewhat shy waiter and Norina is presented as a dishwasher who lives her fantasies through the posture of social networks, topped off by Malatesta, a half-wit. In practice, the libretto is followed faithfully and the action and its entanglement take place in a fairly conventional way, with clever details of direction of actors here and there, trying to make the most of the sarcastic relief of the piece”.
Meanwhile, El Correo highlights Emiliano's novel vision of this title: “Emiliano Suárez's staging is welcome, which moves the action to a pizzeria in southern Italy, with a contemporary and chic setting, wrapped by the scenography of Alfons Flores (a regular of Àlex Ollé and Calixto Bieito) and the lighting of David Picazo.” For its part, Scherzo magazine adds specifically about Emiliano's work the following: “All this is decisive to understand the starting point of Emiliano Suárez's staging, set in a Neapolitan pizzeria of our time (which at every turn showed a different vision by the hand of set designer Alfons Flores) and different insofar as it treats Don Pasquale with the dignity that the character deserves: in the present day it may be that, indeed, a person in his seventies is preserved “agile and good-looking”, as he says he sees himself. And the Don Pasquale presented here, owner of the pizzeria that bears his name, is a person who is willing to let old age become for him something interesting. The mockery and the entanglement, instead of ridiculing the character, serve to de-dramatize the situation [...] a lively style, a more amiable realism, luminous and coherent with what the play has to tell”.