Buxton Festival Turns Handel's Amadigi Into Love Island
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- Olivia Fuchs directed a new staging of Handel's Amadigi di Gaula for Buxton Festival, reimagining the baroque magic opera as a Love Island-style reality TV show with inflatable flamingos, video trickery, and an all-powerful producer replacing sorceresses.
- Hilary Cronin stars as Melissa with "power-suited villainy" praised for shaping Handel's coloratura with every eyebrow-raise, plus a heart-breaking final aria delivered straight down the lens.
- Tim Morgan jumped in as a replacement countertenor for the role of Amadigi, the hapless charmer who "somehow gets the girl with only minor vocal sweat."
- Erin Helyard conducts the English Concert, whose propulsive baroque playing drives the action and compensates for the opera's distinct lack of lower voices, pausing only for emotive oboe and bassoon obbligato moments.
- The production translates Melissa's magic illusions into video trickery, her trial-by-fire into a gameshow challenge, and her final-act tortures into a hot pair of hair-straighteners and an eyelash curler.
- Rowan Pierce's Oriana is described as "vocal silver to Cronin's gold" — lighter and more delicate — while James Hall's Dardano shows vocal agility and bite, his "Pena tiranna" coming dangerously close to hero vibes.
Why it matters: Buxton Festival gambled on recasting Handel's paper-thin four-hander as a Love Island reality show, and the reviewer credits Fuchs's invention plus the English Concert's propulsive playing for making a cast with no lower voices still land emotionally — suggesting baroque modernization can now credibly stretch to reality-TV aesthetics.
