PAGLIACCI and COMMEDIA

Pagliacci climaxes in a show-within-a-show: a performance (which goes completely haywire) of traditional Italian comedy, commedia dell’arte. This ancient theatrical form is perhaps best understood as live-action Looney Tunes. Commedia shows didn’t have much by way of plot. They didn’t use scripts. Instead, stock characters and situations provide a framework for improvised jokes, buffoonery, and rampant silliness. The name commedia dell’arte best translates as “artisanal comedy,” i.e. a bespoke performance, like the kind of cheese sold at a farmer’s market. Yes, they followed a recipe, but it comes out differently each time, that’s half the fun. 

Canio (Diego Torre) and Nedda (Gabriella Reyes) from the 2023 Lyric Opera of Kansas City production of Pagliacci. © Ken Howard

Each commedia performer would specialize in a certain role, and could improvise as that character with the characters becoming better-known than the artists who portrayed them. In performance, commedia characters wore masks. The masks helped exaggerate the characters, in an over-the-top, cartoonish way, and made them instantly recognizable from a distance, no matter who was playing them that time.

The show they’re performing in Pagliacci stars Columbina, her lover Harlequin, her husband Pagliaccio, and their servant Taddeo. Harlequin, one of commedia’s most popular characters, was a poor servant motivated mostly by lust and hunger. Columbina was a smart and sassy lower-class girl; she’s always getting the best of richer characters or male characters (most of whom lust after her). Pagliaccio, was usually sweet, slow, dreamy, and frustrated in love. Taddeo is a big guy who’s easy to frighten and intimidate, something like The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion.

Zerbinetta (Rachele Gilmore) and Harlekin (Andrew Garland) from our 2015 production of Ariadne auf Naxos. © Elise Bakketun

As presented in Pagliacci, Taddeo seems to have picked up characteristics of Pulcinello, or Punch, including a hunchback (better described, today, as “a curvature of the spine”). In our 2024 Pagliacci, the hunch (“gobbo” in Italian) belongs to Taddeo (the character), not to Tonio (the actor); it’s a costume-piece that gets tossed around onstage as they’re setting up the show-within-a-show.  In Tonio/Taddeo Leoncavallo created a character who seems to have internalized what was an external condition. Or, as Nedda tells him, after Tonio tries to rape her: “You’re like the character you play: twisted, warped!”

You can find loads more information about commedia dell’arte online. For a scene of the purest commedia influence on music theater, enjoy this sequence from Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. The 1966 film directed by Richard Lester starred (in this particular scene) Buster Keaton as the dim old man, Jack Gilford as the nervous servant, and the incomparable Zero Mostel as the crafty servant:

Pagliacci runs August 3–17, 2024 at McCaw Hall.
Tickets and info at seattleopera.org/pagliacci.