Our Projects
Hansel & Gretel
Nothing is right at home: the pressure just to get by is mounting every day and Daddy isn’t around anymore to help. Worse than that, Mummy now hates music and has forgotten how to sing, even though the whole family used to love it so much.
When Hansel and Gretel are banished to the woods, they get to sing to their hearts’ content and are ready for any adventure that might come their way. But in this enchanted forest, nothing is as it seems. Something dark lurks there: a wicked witch who craves to possess their lovely voices… With only their ingenuity to protect them, how will the pair escape her clutches? As they travel through a magical woodland world of flickers and echoes, Hansel and Gretel find that if you hang onto hope, even the darkest moments can be overcome.
Marginalia presents a brand-new interpretation of a nineteenth-century classic: Humperdinck’s opera is part charming children’s songs and part Wagnerian drama. Singing in a new English translation, Marginalia weave original fairy-tale narration into the composer’s colourful musical fabric. This sparkling and high-energy production is perfect for children and adults alike, opera novices and experts: entertaining, innovative, and thought-provoking.
A rose by another name: Juliet & Romeo
Romeo and Love have been a pretty dysfunctional team for a long time. Rosaline… that didn’t go so well. Maybe Juliet will finally be the one, if Love can exercise some self-control and rein in her penchant for chaos. But desire and egotism are dangerous bedfellows: Juliet struggles desperately amid powerful currents of coercion and manipulation. A noble passion to heal age-old rifts? Perhaps not.
Marginalia irreverently combines Shakespeare's timeless words with intoxicating melodies from Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi. A newly devised and fully staged fusion of theatre and opera, bringing you star-crossed lovers as never before.
In the Shadow of Notre Dame
Marginalia invites you to rewind the clock 800 years and to explore a world that has remained silent for too long. Journey with us through the streets of a bustling university town, full of bright, ambitious scholars from all over Europe. Follow them over the bridge onto the Île de la Cité and into the towering new cathedral of Notre Dame. There let yourself be transported by some of the most mesmerising and intricate music of all time, and put yourself in the shoes of the exquisitely talented, yet forever nameless singers who created it.
Celestial Divas // Seductive Sirens
Marginalia explores the status of singing women in seventeenth-century Italy in a new programme at the Minerva Festival in Cambridge. At the time of the birth of opera, ever-more prominent singing women called forth both fascination and anxiety: they were celebrated as celestial divas or reviled as corrupting sirens. Our programme explores these different views with music by composers like Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi, as well as poetry dedicated to women performers.
Dangerous Beauty
That magazine you picked up at the airport, that vlog you watched explaining what makeup to wear or how to look younger? Those beauty tips have a longer history than you might think. Marginalia explores female beauty in early modern Italy, playfully juxtaposing the ideal praised in music and poetry with the realities of the female body emerging from cosmetic recipes. Pieces by Monteverdi, Caccini, Strozzi, and Cavalli are interspersed with Petrarchan lyric and beauty ‘secrets’ from Libri di segreti. Beauty could be dangerous – both to the hearts and souls of those who admired it, and to the health of the women who tried to live up to the ideal.
Musa bizzarra
Marginalia brings the life of the seventeenth-century Italian author, singer, and courtesan Margherita Costa (c. 1600–after 1657) to the stage for the first time. Born into an obscure Roman family, Costa forged a career on the glittering stages of baroque Europe and became the most published and diverse woman writer of her generation. Against a rising tide of hostility towards female creatives, Costa fought for her bold and innovative voice to be heard, demonstrating a striking ability to hold her own. Yet even within her lifetime, she found herself submerged into obscurity – an injustice that has been allowed to stand, with Costa’s works overlooked to this day. Marginalia brings new research on this extraordinary woman to life on stage, exploring what it means to be a marginalised creative voice today.