Organization

Singer

Soprano

Sabina Puértolas

Manon Lescaut

Baritone

Damián del Castillo

Lescaut

Bass

Javier Castañeda

Count des Grieux

Tenor

Ismael Jordi

Chevalier des Grieux

Manuel de Diego

Guillot de Morfontaine

César San Martín

Monsieur de Brétigny

Mezzo-soprano

Marina Pardo

Rosette

Nuria García Arrés

The Maid

Stage director

Alfonso Romero Mora

Natalia Labourdette

Poussette

Zayra Ruiz

Javotte

Conductor

Carlos Aragón

Costume designer

Jesús Ruiz

Set designer

Ricardo Sánchez Cuerda

Teatro Villamarta

Others

Coro Del Teatro Villamarta

Orchestra

Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga

Manon

Jerez de la Frontera

Spain

Public

Approved

Who is Manon? and above all what do you want? At first reading it may seem that he is a capricious, fickle and superficial character, but if something characterizes his personality is his insatiable need for freedom: Freedom to decide, love and play, always doubling the bet. Her mental flight and ability to love freely is so far ahead of her time that no one, not even De Grieux, is capable of following her. It is a free verse that you can read, but never understand. 

My staging literally revolves around Manon. For her, the world is an immense and inexhaustible field of play and fantasy, and it is precisely there, in her fantasy, where the whole scene is generated. 

On stage we will see the rich universe created by the young woman's imagination. Mix of styles and eras, scenes full of eroticism and sophistication, characters that resonate in the same frequency as Manon and serve to define her figure and her dreams. The unconditional love of De Grieux, the clumsy courtship of Bretigni, the outdated debauchery of Guillot, the glamor and eroticism of the three coquettes or the hypocrisy of her cousin Lescaut, all serve to make her shine and shape a unique and rare personality, that of a young woman who dreams of playing, and plays to dream a future full of sensuality and enjoyment of the senses. 

Only at the end of the opera will we realize that this dream of the future is actually the dream of a past that never existed. 

The physical death of the protagonist written in the libretto becomes in my proposal a living death, a moral death. Manon's dream life has been just that, a dream. He has married and has two children with De Grieux. He lives in a bourgeois apartment and irons while struggling to keep imagining what his life could have been like. Her husband is coming home from work. She receives him and apologizes perhaps for a past infidelity. She wants. She surely too. But it's not her. It's been a long time since I stopped being her. 

She gives her husband a half smile, goes back to her ironing task and almost breathlessly says to herself in a small voice: "This was the story of Manon ... Lescaut." 

ALFONSO ROMERO MORA

English

Manon by Massenet, From (2022/2022), Directed by Alfonso Romero Mora,, Conductor Carlos Aragón, Teatro Villamarta, Jerez de la Frontera, Spain

Performance credits (Cast & Crew )

Cast

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Ensemble

Program, About & Synopsis

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