Chuck Hudson returns to Minnesota Opera with ‘The Barber of Seville.’ 

Chuck Hudson’s training as a mime helps to inform his production of the comedic opera.

By Sheila Regan, MinnPost Artscape, 2025

The roots of Minnesota Opera’s upcoming production of “The Barber of Seville” by composer Gioachino Rossini and librettist Cesare Sterbini go back all the way to 1994, when it was first staged at the Ordway by Christopher Mattaliano. 

Seven years later, in 2001, Chuck Hudson restaged the production in his first collaboration with The Minnesota Opera. Fast forward to today, Hudson returns to the Minnesota Opera, joining forces with principal conductor Christopher Franklin to bring Rossini’s beloved comedic opera to life. 

Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” is based on a play of the same name by a French playwright named Pierre Beaumarchais, who’d go on to write two more sequels, one of which was “The Marriage of Figaro,” used by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in his famous opera.

The production mixes original elements of the 1994 production – including its set design by Allen Moyer and scenic painting by Erica Zaffarano – with new costumes by Mathew LeFebvre and hair and make-up by Emma Gustafson. 

Here’s an interview with Hudson about his background as a gymnast and mime and his physical approach to the show. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Sheila Regan: I hear you studied with Marcel Marceau.

Chuck Hudson: I did. I spent six years with him. It was three years as a student. During those three years I became his teaching assistant at the school, and then I became a member of his company, and I started teaching at the school. So what was nice is that I got to spend time with him on stage as a professional, but also off-stage, touring. You’re five hours on a train with him, and he starts talking about working with Bertolt Brecht or Elizabeth Taylor, and you’re like, OK, these stories I have to hear.

SR: What got you interested in mime?

CH: I was always into physical theater. I was an actor when I was younger, but I was also a competitive gymnast. My parents got me into gymnastics classes as soon as I started jumping off the roof of my house. And they were like, we probably should get him trained to do this. So I was always the guy that was swinging in on ropes or jumping off of platforms. I started doing fencing and other circus skills – that led me to classical theater. I was always the angry guy with a sword, because I knew how to do those sorts of movements. I was studying at the University of Houston, and they had a mime company there. The gentleman who was the former Olympic fencing master of South Africa, was teaching there, and I was in his fencing and theatrical stage combat classes. Marcel Marceau taught him mime. 

When I was a sophomore, we were doing a dress rehearsal for a show. My teacher snuck Marceau into the dress rehearsal – thank God I didn’t know that he was there. At the end of the rehearsal, he came up to me, I was introduced to him, and he said, “What are you doing when you graduate college?” And I said, I’m going to go to LA and be a movie star, because that’s what I thought I wanted to do. And he said, “Well, if you’d like to come to Paris and study with me in two years, I just saw your audition, and you’re in.” I couldn’t say no to an opportunity like that. 

SR: How does this non verbal performance form inform your work in opera?

CH: Marceau had this wonderful ability to find universal human behavior. His show could be performed in the United States, in any country, in Europe, in South America, in Asia, no matter what language the people spoke. This universal human behavior was happening on stage – everyone recognized themselves in it. 

Music is very similar to that. Marceau even said that his style of acting was closer to music than it was to cinematic naturalism. For example, in music, one note suspended above the rest, over an audience, will make people laugh, make them cry or make them hush. It’s that same thing. So I found that the more I used recognizable, universal human behavior on stage, rather than trying to indicate what the text is saying, the audiences could recognize human behavior and could understand the action of what was going on. 

Add to that, then, his amazing comic timing. Marceau’s exercise about comic timing is the way I started our rehearsal process. I had the entire cast go through a physical exercise that introduces his idea of comic timing, so that we all had this shared comic vocabulary as well as a physical, stylistic vocabulary that we could use while they’re singing Rossini. 

SR: And what can you tell me about the performers? 

CH: It’s a wonderful group of people. There’s two different casts, so that’s always interesting, too, that I’m getting two different individual interpretations of the same role, doing the same staging of bel canto music. 

There are a handful of the singers that I’ve worked with often, Andrew Wilkowske, who’s playing Bartolo – I’ve worked with him for over 20 years. We’ve done several shows together, many of them here (in) Minnesota. So we have this, this shorthand of communication. His comic timing is genius.

SR: What would you say in terms of the music of this show? You talked about the Bel Canto aspect, anything that you just love about the music itself? 

CH: The first time I ever heard this music was Bugs Bunny’s “The Rabbit of Seville.” So as a kid, this music has been in my head. Tons of movies have used this music as well and commercials. You’ll be sitting in the orchestra in the very opening, the overture, and you’ll hear the first piece of music, and you’ll go, Oh my God, that reminds me of something. Everyone laughs almost instantly when they just hear the overture. So all of my own mentors in the past have said, stage the overture at your own risk, because people want to hear that overture. They don’t want to be busy seeing what you’re doing. And as a physical and visual director, it’s really hard for me not to stage it. But I don’t. This is the moment that the orchestration gets to shine. 

There’s a storm scene in this as well – Rossini is famous for his storm scenes, and that’s where we get to combine the music and my love of mime. I love to put homages to Marcel Marceau in shows. He was famous for walking against the wind. So there’s a group of movement artists that are on stage with some umbrellas that are doing variations of his mime piece timed to the music so that the orchestration and the movement are combined in that moment. You can’t not move while you’re listening to this because the music itself is entertaining. 

Slapstick is beer, and Rossini is champagne. When you listen to it, we don’t want to mix beer and champagne – that makes you nauseous, that doesn’t make you intoxicated. So the physical style of the show has to be just as light, explosive, entertaining and bubbly as the music.