Gianluca Margheri's Sexy Stranger in Fairy Queen

Gianluca Margheri as The Stranger in The Fairy Queen

Italian über-barihunk Gianluca Margheri plays The Stranger in the Erkel Theaters' updated and revised version of Purcell's The Fairy Queen. He spends much of the opera in various states of undress, including a sexy scene in his tighty whities. 

The composiiton was was originally a “semi-opera,” a series of musical passages created for a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream which did not relate an independent story, but only took on true meaning in conjunction with the prose work.  

Purcell wrote The Fairy-Queen for the 15th wedding anniversary of England's King William III and Queen Mary II, with its initial performance taking place in grand fashion at London's Queen's Theatre in 1692. The composer died three years later at the age of 36. The score to The Fairy-Queen was lost for centuries,  until it was rediscovered in the early part of the 20th century.

Gianluca Margheri as The Stranger in The Fairy Queen

Director András Almási-Tóth conceives the work as an opera and incorporates the music into a new story. This version of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in an urban woodland, with lonely characters, crime, murder and love. The figure of the Fairy Queen here is a kind of femme fatale: a woman in search of herself and her own happiness and finding neither as she flees from one relationship to the next.

Tickets are available online. 

Margheri can next be heard at the Musicale Trapanese on July 27 and 29 as Raimondo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.