This production of the Beethoven opera focused on one principle problem: Fidelio is actually a woman. This is a real problem because all of the other characters have to believe that she is a man. No matter how high she sings, or how big her breasts? So. This opera is about a woman who is trying to break her husband out of prison where he has been held for two years for political reasons. We never know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. It is impossible to tell. But his wife, Leonore, disguises herself as a man (Fidelio) and gets a job at a prison and works there for a very long time and no one suspects that he’s a she. In order to gain access to the secret cell where her husband “might” be undergoing torture she seduces the warden’s daughter and gets engaged. This is sort of a problem. I was unable to solve it wholly to my satisfaction, but I repeat-this is a problem that held my attention from beginning to end. My solution took multiple forms. We costumed Fidelio in a very realistic mustache and she wore a tight t-shirt during the overture. I gave her an ax and pile of firewood in need of splitting. Throughout the overture, in her super-tight t-shirt that made her breasts also super obvious she sweated away and with giant swings of her ax she split ten or twelve logs into smithereens. This made her look more or less super powerful and Marzelline was thoroughly in love.

In the end, she finds her husband and stands alone, stunned as he races headlong back into the arms of the same political machinery that had imprisoned him some years prior. To show this strange revolution of power that doesn’t even pretend to solve problems, we reconstructed Obama’s famous Beer Summit and all of the bad guys settled down for a beer during the final vaguely fascist chorus. Everyone enjoys their moment of resolution so completely that no one notices when the four-year-old walks to the rear of the room and lifts a gigantic boulder above his head as the smoke begins to pour out of the windows of warden’s home.