Manon Lescaut It always works if this opera is presented in a production that perfectly captures its essence: an apotheosis of melodrama, like virtually the entirety of Puccini's catalog. In the last twenty years, the Liceu has presented three different productions of Puccini's third opera, based on the novel The History of the Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut of theabbot Prévost. A story also inspired by the operas of Auber, Massenet, and Henze. Now, Puccini's version has returned to the Rambla. A production of the Frankfurt Opera, with stage direction by Àlex Ollé and part of his usual team: set designer Alfons Flores, costume designer Lluc Castells and lighting designer Joachim Klein.

The audience that will see Manon Lescaut At the Liceu, you will first encounter a video projection. Manon is an undocumented immigrant crossing a border to reach Europe. She then works in a clandestine garment workshop. With this prologue, stage director Àlex Ollé brings Giacomo Puccini's opera, premiered in 1893 and inspired by the novel, into the present day. The story of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut (1731), by Abbé Prévost. "It works perfectly," Ollé assured at a press conference this Wednesday. "Manon's great love is that love of someone who doesn't want to give up a better future, and that fits with our version, with an undocumented immigrant girl who enters Europe to meet her brother," he added. In the opera, Manon's brother, Sergeant Lescaut, takes her to a convent in accordance with their father's wishes. Ollé has the parents send a letter to the brother asking him to bring Manon home. Instead of returning, she embarks on the journey of love, ambition, disappointment, deception, escape, and despair that unfolds in the opera's four acts, which the stage director sets in sordid locations, such as a club where Manon works as a stripper and the cells where she awaits deportation.

In two famous literary essays, Bruno Bettelheim, on the one hand, and Gianni Rodari, on the other, explored the psychoanalytic keys to children's rondallistics. Rusalka, Christoph Loy seems to have had this in mind, because the show moves away from the fantasy imagery inherent in The Little Mermaid Andersen's work to delve into a reading in which the subconscious and many of its revealed taboos contribute to understanding the hidden background of Antonin Dvořák's opera. The production, co-produced by Dresden, Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, ​​does not leave anyone indifferent, and is one of those that makes you think, apart from its plastic beauty thanks to the set design by Johannes Leiacker and the lighting by Bernd Purkrabek. To all this we must add some winks, such as the unresponsive feet of the dancer, which in a certain way evoke the protagonist of Chaplin's Limelight, while the roles of Hajny and Kuchtik also fall somewhere between Chaplin and Beckett. Overall, the show perfectly sculpted the characters and is a marvel of action and stage movement, thanks to Klevis Elmazaj's choreography.