It felt like a historic night across the Civic Center, making me happy to see how San Francisco comes back: Just steps away at Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony was also making headlines — conductor Elim Chan, newly appointed as the orchestra’s first-ever female Music Director Designate, was leading her inaugural concert in that role: a programme of Mendelssohn, Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde Prelude and Liebestod, and Debussy’s La Mer. The Civic Center – Grove Street closed between the Symphony and the opera house – was buzzing with an electricity rarely felt even by San Francisco’s generous cultural standards — two major houses, two classic music milestone evenings, one city block.
Rossini’s comic masterpiece gets a sun-drenched, flamenco-fired revival at the War Memorial Opera House
There are operas that delight audiences, and then there is Il Barbiere di Siviglia — Gioachino Rossini’s 210-year-old comedy that has arguably never left the repertoire since it conquered its rocky premiere in Rome in February 1816. In June 2026, San Francisco Opera opened the summer portion of its season with a revival of Spanish director Emilio Sagi’s vivacious production, and for those of us lucky enough to occupy seats at the War Memorial Opera House, the question was not merely whether Rossini’s perennial crowd-pleaser would charm again — it always does — but whether this particular cast and creative revival could inject genuine surprise into a work so beloved it risks feeling merely comfortable.
The answer, it turns out, is a nuanced and largely satisfying yes. This production, first unveiled here in 2013 and revived in 2015, makes its third appearance on the SF Opera stage with an almost entirely fresh cast — one that includes a stunning American debut from Russian mezzo-soprano Maria Kataeva as Rosina, a pedigree-heavy lineup in the comprimario roles, and two tenor and two baritone alternates sharing the principal parts across the run. The June performance that I attended specifically put Levy Sekgapane (Count Almaviva), Joshua Hopkins (Figaro), and Kataeva center stage — a trio that to me generated real chemistry even if some critics pointed out it operates at uneven heights vocally and dramatically.
San Francisco Opera has a deep, century-long love affair with this opera. As program essayist Kip Cranna notes, Barber has now been staged by the company in 28 previous seasons. That institutional attachment shows in the production’s finesse: the crew knows this piece, the house knows this score, and the audience arrives already half in love. The Sagi production, at its best, rewards that affection with genuine theatrical invention — and on this particular Friday evening, with the added frisson of a simultaneous live-stream broadcast to a wider world, the house seemed energized, expectant, alive.
Scheming, Serenading, and the Art of the Disguise
The plot of The Barber of Seville is a masterclass in comic construction, drawn from the first play of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s celebrated Figaro trilogy, written in the 1770s. Cesare Sterbini adapted it for Rossini’s libretto with an efficiency that borders on genius: in two tightly wound acts, every scene propels the intrigue forward, and every misunderstanding compounds the last with comic precision.
Act I opens in a Seville street at night. Count Almaviva, a Spanish nobleman travelling incognito, has fallen madly in love with Rosina — a young ward kept under virtual house arrest by her guardian, the middle-aged Dr. Bartolo, who plans to marry her himself. Almaviva serenades Rosina under the name “Lindoro,” pretending to be a poor student so she might love him for himself rather than his title. Into this tableau bounds Figaro, the neighbourhood’s barber, fixer, and self-proclaimed factotum of all trades, who agrees to help the Count penetrate Bartolo’s fortress of a household — for a suitable fee, naturally. The Count’s first scheme, disguising himself as a drunken soldier billeted to Bartolo’s house, ends in gloriously escalating chaos: a love note palmed to Rosina, a suspicious laundry list, police intervention, and a crowd of bewildered bystanders. The audience during the performance I attended was frequently laughing aloud — and Rossini earns every single laugh.
Act II accelerates the scheming. Almaviva returns disguised as “Don Alonso,” a music teacher standing in for the ailing Don Basilio. The ruse nearly unravels when the real Basilio arrives looking suspiciously healthy, only to be bribed off with a gold ring. A thunderstorm, a stolen balcony key, a missing ladder, and a last-minute notary complete the farce. By the finale, Rosina and the Count are married — and the dispossessed Dr. Bartolo is left fuming but ultimately consoled by being allowed to keep Rosina’s dowry. Love wins; money helps it along nicely. The program’s synopsis rightly notes that “Money works wonders” is an early line in the opera — a wryly apt motto for a comedy in which almost every tender moment has a transactional dimension.
“Love may drive the plot, but almost everything about the affairs of the heart is transactional — disguises, purloined love letters, a weaselly snitch bought off with a flashy ring.”
— San Francisco Chronicle on the 2026 revival
Bel Canto Fireworks: Rossini’s Score Reconsidered
Rossini composed the entire score in approximately two to three weeks — a fact that strains credulity given its density of invention. The opera premiered on February 20, 1816, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome, to one of opera history’s most famous fiascos: the audience, loyal to Giovanni Paisiello’s earlier setting of the same story, booed and hissed through the performance. Within a season, however, Rossini’s version had eclipsed all competition and begun its march toward becoming the most-performed comic opera in the repertoire.
The score’s architecture is a marvel of comedic pacing. The overture — famously recycled from an earlier Rossini work — builds irresistible momentum through a single long crescendo that gathers the evening’s mischievous energy into itself. Act I then launches with Almaviva’s gentle nocturnal serenade “Ecco ridente in cielo”, before Figaro’s explosive entrance aria “Largo al factotum” — the rapid-fire, patter-driven tour de force in which the barber enumerates his own indispensability to the entire city. Rosina’s answering aria, “Una voce poco fa,” is the score’s other signature showpiece: its orchestral introduction alone maps Rosina’s contradictory personality — docile and obedient on the surface, a viper when provoked. Don Basilio’s bass aria “La calunnia è un venticello” provides the opera’s great comic metaphor for gossip’s unstoppable power: it begins as a whisper and grows to a thunderclap.
At the June 5th performance, conductor Benjamin Manis — returning to SF Opera after a hit run of Carmen in 2024 — drove the score with energy and muscular drive, particularly capturing the bravura ensemble moments. Some critics noted occasional balance issues between the pit and the more lyrically minded principals, but the orchestra’s rhythmic precision in the big finales was a consistent pleasure throughout a three-hour-plus evening that never dragged.
Sun, Shadow, and a Riot of Color
Emilio Sagi’s production — a co-production with the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, first seen at the War Memorial in 2013 — is built on a single powerful visual conceit: the world of the opera begins in stark black and white, and color is introduced gradually, blooming like a time-lapse flower until the finale explodes in a fireworks-and-confetti carnival of pigment. Set designer Llorenç Corbella achieves this with a diagonally raked platform thrusting upstage — a dynamic architectural line around which performers orbit, ascend, and disappear — with a large open dark wedge beneath the playing surface on stage right. In one audacious sequence, a billowing bolt of white cloth floods across this shadow space to illustrate Don Basilio’s aria of slander in purely physical, almost surrealist terms.
Costume designer Pepa Ojanguren’s wardrobe begins in variations of alabaster — soldiers in crisp white uniforms, Rosina initially frozen in a snow-white gown — and gradually introduces reds and golds that take over the stage entirely by curtain call. The flamenco-inflected choreography, originally by Nuria Castejón and restaged here by Colm Seery, adds a distinctly Iberian physicality to the staging — entirely appropriate given Sagi’s all-Spanish creative team. The production treats Seville as an abstraction of itself: sun-bleached, playful, slightly surreal, populated with wheeled contraptions, bicycle-vendor carts, and physical comedy that sits somewhere between Fellini and commedia dell’arte.
And then there were the curtain calls. The full theatrical power of the War Memorial Opera House auditorium was unleashed as the lighting design by Gary Marder suddenly illuminated the side walls and gilded boxes of the house itself — folding the audience into the spectacle, turning the whole room into the final scene’s celebration. It was an unexpectedly moving theatrical gesture: the opera wasn’t ending on the stage, it was ending around us, inside the architecture we were sitting in. The house erupted. Moments like that are why one travels to the opera house rather than streaming from home.
Mixed Reviews, One Undisputed Star
Critics attending the opening night on May 28th largely converged on the same headline: the production is charming and the direction inventive, but the ensemble was uneven, redeemed enormously by the sensational American debut of Maria Kataeva. San Francisco Classical Voice called the revival “witty but uneven,” praising Kataeva as “a delectable chameleon — a swoony lover one moment, an antic clown the next,” while flagging that Joshua Hopkins “moved stiffly and lacked charisma,” and that Levy Sekgapane’s “bel canto ornaments came off as superficially applied” early in the evening.
Piedmont Exedra was warmer, calling the production a “Rossini gem” and singling out Kataeva’s “bright high lines and a good measure of vocal bombast” alongside the comic fireworks of Renato Girolami as Dr. Bartolo — “bolting around the stage in a perpetual, sputtering fury,” then floating effortlessly into falsetto for his patter songs. The San Francisco Chronicle offered the most generous accounting of the evening, noting that the production “succeeds in delighting its audience” and is “an enjoyable way to launch the company’s summer season,” while still acknowledging Manis’s conducting as occasionally rough in ensemble balance.
What critics broadly agreed on: when Kataeva was on stage, the performance transcended its uneven moments. Her Rosina — radiant, scheming, vocally opulent — is the kind of debut that makes a career. The June 5th performance, which carried the added electricity of a live-stream broadcast, felt like a night the house understood it was witnessing something worth remembering.
Go and get tickets – It is a fun night to remember!
Personally, I had an amazing time. The laughter in the house was genuine, generous, and frequent — Rossini’s comic timing lands as freshly in 2026 as it did two centuries ago, and this cast and production know exactly how to serve it. The curtain-call lighting, flooding the sides of the auditorium in warm gold as the company took its bows, was one of those theatrical surprises that stops you mid-applause and makes you simply gape. One of the great evenings of the season.
Bottom line, San Francisco Opera’s revival of Sagi’s Barber of Seville is an evening of genuine theatrical pleasure, built on one of the opera world’s most indelible scores and brought to life by a production that never loses its visual inventiveness or comic nerve. It will remain a privilege for me to have attended a performance that will be remembered above all for Maria Kataeva’s American debut — a Rosina of rare completeness, vocally sumptuous and dramatically alive to every beat. Per the critics, the remainder of the cast has its rough edges, and Manis’s conducting occasionally prioritises drive over finesse, but these are quibbles about the seasoning, not the dish. Rossini’s comedy is essentially indestructible, and in Sagi’s sun-scorched, color-drunk, flamenco-fired production — capped by a curtain-call lighting display that transformed the entire auditorium into the final scene’s celebration — it arrived in San Francisco looking, and feeling, as irresistible as ever.