oboeinsight

The producer who inspired a fashion for Shakespeare in recent British cinema now plans to bring the operatic work of Mozart to mainstream film audiences.

Twenty years ago Stephen Evans produced Henry V, starring Kenneth Branagh, despite scepticism from investors and distributors who predicted it would be a commercial failure. In fact the film won two Oscar nominations for Branagh as best director and best actor and is still making money. Now Evans is banking on a romantic comedy inspired by Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte – and with a Mozart soundtrack – becoming a similarly unexpected hit.

The film, just finished and provisionally titled First Night, is a feelgood British drama. In it Richard E Grant, star of Gosford Park, plays a wealthy businessman who assembles a troupe of singers to stage Così Fan Tutte in his stately home. At a test screening last week the audience loved it.

Evans said: “People who didn’t know opera were more excited than the people who did. The music is so wonderful, so lyrical. People uninterested in opera found themselves loving the music.”

Some years back I saw the movie Cosi, about some mentally ill patients putting on the opera Così fan tutte.

Guess Così is movie worthy, eh?

Um … Sarah Brightman is in it. I will keep my comments to myself. Aside from that sentence.

I read about the movie here.

Of course nothing can beat the actual opera and the exquisite music.