Fanciulla

Fanciulla del West - The Girl of the Golden West, or in Danish, something that looks oddly like Pig del Vest, is very late Puccini, written in America about Californian gold miners, the 'girl' of the title, Minnie, who runs the only bar in the miners' shanty town, and her relationship with gang boss Dick Johnson [the tenor - of course] and the nasty sheriff, Jack Rance - the bass.

I got very fond of it in the end, but it has been rudely described as 'Puccini without the tunes' and it did take a bit of getting into.

It's actually very difficult indeed to design and make interesting and convincing work clothes from another period, 1880s in this case... they tend to come out boring, un-real or just plain wrong.

In the end I went for pencil drawn photo-realism. I had been provided with photos of all the chorus, and managed to find pix of the principals on the internet, and worked with a method that involved the computer a good deal, printing out the photos, drawing the costumes over, or alongside, then scanning them back in again, framing and adding simple back-grounds in photo shop, and printing them out again on heavy art paper. A bit laborious, but it worked beautifully, and the cast greeted their drawings with little cries of delight as they recognised themselves and each other!