Wolfgang Mozart was a weird little dude who was obsessed with farts and butts , collected birds, drank to excess, and was pathologically afraid of trumpets. He was sick his whole life and dead by age 35, with so many historic ailments that nobody’s sure which one killed him. But in his short life, he managed to compose over 600 separate musical works, among them symphonies, masses, operas, and piano concerti. Of his 22 operas, Don Giovanni , The Marriage of Figaro , Cosi fan tutte , and The Magic Flute are considered “the big four,” meaning the ones that you commonly see produced.
The last is actually one of the most produced operas ever, period. Like many companies, Seattle Opera offers up The Magic Flute every eight or 10 years, and understandably—it’s a marketing slam dunk, and everyone goes to hear the coloratura sing the Queen of the Night’s badass aria, "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" (“Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”). ' TMF is fun for kids and/or opera novices too because of the giant snake and the ghost children and the rainbow birdperson and the cheerful, Mozart-branded fatuousness of it all. Visually dazzling and musically merry, even when they’re singing about Hell’s vengeance and stabbing people to death, it’s a yummy, easy opera starter kit. The grilled cheese of opera.
Well! Seattle Opera’s leveling up this round, folks. Our local shop’s 2025 production of The Magic Flute , opening February 22, includes a glorious, fully animated film that rolls behind the cast, as they interact with it to tell the musical fairy tale. Co-artistic directors Paul Barritt and Suzanne Andrade are the founders of 1927, a British theater company that combines animated film and live performance, and they worked closely with Aussie stage director Barrie Kosky over the course of three years to create this juicy, vivid, terrifically bizarre cover of the Mozart classic . This animated production debuted at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2012, and it’s since seen short residencies in cities across the world and, in its current tour, throughout Germany and in San Francisco. Now it’s Seattle’s turn.
The animated set was hand-drawn by Barritt, who took inspiration from Buster Keaton films, Monty Python, and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror , among other early-20th-century sources. I personally see Gorey, Svankmajer, and Beardsley in there too, and maybe some Metropolis and Yellow Submarine references, along with an overt visual quote from the “Pink Elephants on Parade” number in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
Altogether, it’s really something. Bright, splashy murals of moths and monsters flutter and swoop, while forests and flowers bloom around the cast mid-song. Players are costumed in contemporary 1920s clothing, men’s suits and flapper wear, not the royal finery and parrot costumes you usually see in this production. Because the opera is performed in the flesh while the cartoon movie plays behind the action, it lends the effect of a silent film performed with a live band—but there’s so much more involved here. Not only must the cast endure the Olympics-grade athletic feat of singing a two-and-half-hour operatic score, they must also memorize all the stage marks, projection cues, and choreography that allow them to leap between the illustrated rooftops or appear in sky-high 2D doorways or dance with cartoon tarantulas. For example: In this show, the character of Papageno, the bird catcher, has a little illustrated black cat who follows him around on the screen—a good sidekick for a birdcatcher!—and so the player must keep track of where the projected kitty is without actually being able to see him, as up close to the screen as he is.
To be clear, projected illustrations have been used in opera for decades, and even Seattle Opera has made use of them recently, as in 2022’s Tristan and Isolde or 2018’s The Turn of the Screw . We’ve had the technology. But this show is the most x-treme level of projected illustration that I personally know about in an opera production here in Seattle, and certainly the most deluxe and phantasmagorical. The lushness of these illustrations. The detail and the density.
If you’re not familiar with the plot of The Magic Flute , it basically goes like this: A prince, Tamino, gets chased by a giant serpentine monster and is rescued by three mysterious ladies. They show him a picture of the Queen of the Night's daughter, Pamina, who is hot and has been kidnapped by an evil black-magic guy, Sarastro. Tamino instantly falls in love with Pamina. Armed with an enchanted flute, he enlists his birdcatcher buddy Papageno to help him pass the buck and rescue the princess from Sarastro. When he delivers Pamina to her mom, the Queen, she tries to force Panima to kill Sarastro with a dagger, but Pamina’s like nah, and they realize her mom actually sucks. They also decide that Sarastro is cool and chill, so they ask that guy to marry them, which he does. Plus Papageno meets a hot birdcatcher chick and they hook up too. In the end, they defeat the Queen with lightness and logic.
Mozart died a couple months after The Magic Flute ’s 1791 premiere in Vienna, so this work is considered his swan song. The libretto was written by his childhood friend, the prolific actor-composer Emanuel Schikaneder; it’s styled as a Singspiel, with considerable spoken dialogue interspersed among the songs, like a Broadway musical. There is a probable undercurrent of Freemasonry here, with the heroes using logic and reason to triumph over symbolic Catholicism—the queen is said to represent Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, who hated the shit out of the Freemasons, of which Mozart and Schinkaneder were members. However, on its surface, the story is set in a zany Aquarian fantasy world and is a bunch of silly nonsense, ripe for cartoonification.
Lush illustrations aside, the cast of players is loaded with vocal dynamos, including coloratura soprano Sharleen Joynt —who was apparently on Season 18 of The Bachelor ??—as the Queen of the Night, in her fourth role in a Seattle Opera production. The role of Pamina is traded between sopranos Brandie Sutton and Camille Ortiz, who are dolled up like Louise Brooks in a black bob and a Peter Pan collar. Atlanta native Victor Robinson—in his Seattle Opera debut, fresh off a Grammy nomination for his work on the X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X album—and veteran Seattle Opera collaborator Duke Kim trade off on the tenor slot, Prince Tamino, dressed in a plain black suit and tie, Pulp Fiction -style. Filipino tenor Rodell Rosel reprises the role as the rapey bad guy Monostatos; in Seattle Opera’s 2017 production, he was in blue body paint and a swirly mustache, but here, he’s a creepy ringer for Murnau’s Nosferatu . The almost totally POC cast is refreshing in the traditionally very white classical universe, by the way, and the show’s conductor, Christine Brandes, is exciting to see in an industry where women conductors are still, maddeningly, scarce.
At once sweet, sunny, and deliciously nefarious, The Magic Flute is such a perfect choice to give the animated treatment, especially since it's so heavily sampled in all the movies and cartoons we grew up watching. The Queen of the Night aria scene will be worth the trip alone—the Queen sings it as a huge leggy spider, crouched in her web as she throws red cartoon daggers at her daughter, Pamina, per the lyrics. Plus there are dancing anthropomorphic wolves. (Symbolism? Probably!) Weird-ass Wolfgang would definitely approve.
