This North Coast Weekend

The HSU Opera Workshop presents Mozart's opera The Magic Flute for three performances this weekend: Friday and Saturday (April 22, 23) at 8 p.m., and Sunday (April 24) at 2 p.m. in Gist Hall Theatre.  Students Brandy Rose and Philip de Roulet, and community singers Nanette Voss, Christopher Hatcher and Steve Nobles sing the principal roles. With dialogue in English, it’s relocated by director Elisabeth Harrington and scenographer Rachel Parti to the Mayan culture, which adds color and imagery (a leopard, a lion and lots of birds) and strengthens a nature-based emphasis. “It’s a show for all ages,” Harrington said, “with magic and comedy and drama, but focused on love and friendship, nobility and bravery.”  Paul Cummings, who directs the accompanying 20-piece orchestra, says the music is among Mozart’s best.  More info.

The Fence In Its Thousandth Year by contemporary British playwright Howard Barker is presented at Dell'Arte Thursday through Sunday (April 21-24) at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. According to Dell'Arte: "Written in 2005, Barker's play is a powerful theatrical journey into the borderlands between social classes, metaphorically presented as a literal fence where the powerful and the powerless exist in a tense, emotional symbiosis. Sexually explicit, viscerally emotional and hauntingly poetic, Barker's imagined world speaks to our contemporary social and cultural divisions through the heightened language of the theater." This project on tragedy by the Dell'Arte School's second year MFA's is directed by Stephanie Thompson.

Continuing: Final weekend for the HSU dance concert Gravity Defined in the Van Duzer; Othello continues at North Coast Rep, South Pacific at Ferndale Rep.