Opera Western Reserve

Always an audience favorite for its dramatic, passionate music and colorful scenes, “Pagliacci” (The Clown) is a Verismo style opera, featuring realistic characters thrust into everyday life crises. Italian composer Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote both the wrods and the music in 1892, and not only is the opera based on a true story, but it is perhaps Opera’s original “Reality Show.”

The story follows a raucous band of traveling clowns, jugglers, and actors who arrive in a small italian town to perform their boisterous comedy act. Amid the circus-like atmosphere, tensions arise behind the scenes between the actor playing Pagliaccio, the lead clown, and his young wife. Pagliaccio suspects his wife is having an affair. As his personal conflict is mirrored in the drama they are portraying on stage, the boundaries between performance and reality begin to blur. Consumed with jealousy, suspicion, and rage, Pagliaccio is unable to separate his own life from the fictional play they are enacting. A real-life tragedy unfolds on stage while the audience of villagers mistakes the emotionally-charged drama as expert acting.