Drink up: Donizetti's 'Elisir d'Amore' bottles love story at Opera Naples

"What We Do For Love" is a rock hit, but it's also a perfect theme for the Donizetti opera  "L'Elisir d"Amore."

It's just the right work for the month of Valentine's Day, with its desperate lover willing to glug down a love potion to win his coy heartthrob, the girlfriend willing to marry his rival out of jealousy and a charlatan willing to make them all happy — for a fee. 

If this romance sounds like the dramas we all went through in high school, it is. There's a lot to laugh about in watching characters' romantic blunders and near-disasters. Opera Naples stage director Omer Ben Seadia has flipped the time machine switch to bring it into the hyperventilated 1980s, the era of big hair, MTV videos and padded shoulders. 

"I adore the piece. It's such a wholeheartedly delightful comedy from beginning to end," declared the Israel-born Ben Seadia. "Every time you approach a piece like this that has been done many times, you ask yourself: What can I bring to this, a fresh way to look at it."

The penny stock craze of the ’80s gave her a eureka moment. 

"A lot of people gave their money up because of this glamorous idea of investing and reaping great rewards," she said.

In the same vein, our longing lover Nemorino is willing to buy what's advertised as a love potion to make him attractive to the — apparently — unswayed Adina. 

"Also there was this great resurgence of money and wealth and fashion and music — some might say terrible music," she added, laughing. "So it had everything I was looking for."

Ben Seadia replaces Renata Scotto, who operates a vocal academy at the Wang Center, because some personal business prevented Scotto from handling the opera as well as the academy. Some of her students are singing in a blended cast that includes the company's artists in residence.

Ben Seadia has taken the challenge of directing her first "L'Elisir" deeply, combing history books looking for the right combinations of personalities.

She came up with a Bill Gates-ian Nemorino. His rival, Belcore, would be a Tom Cruise sort of charmer in the "Top Gun" mold: "He's the very handsome soldier who flies into town," Ben Seadia explained. 

Adina is styled on an Olivia Newton-John kind of charm: wholesome, fun-loving.

This production of "L'Elisir d'Amore" will even have dance, again in the ’80s mold, when Jane Fonda workouts and Jazzercise were the moves of the day. So the Opera Naples Chorus will not only sing in their first Wang Center opera but will also incorporate dance.

"They don't dance like professionals. They dance like you and I do — they dance out of their heart," she said. 

Say, isn't there some music involved here? Absolutely, according to Ramón Tebar, artistic director, who was putting the 16-piece orchestra through its paces last week. He is working doubly on this opera because a number of the principals change from the first to the second performance. 

The showstopper is, of course, "Una furtiva lagrima," Nemorino's aria, sung after he sees Adina visibly moved by the prospect of losing him. But Tebar finds their first-act duet a work of "the genius of Donizetti," in that Adina uses the melody to boast about flirting, while Nemorino's harmony says that his love can only be for her. 

Her aria, beseeching Nemorino to stay in his home town where he is loved ("Prendi, per me sei libero") after she has purchased his freedom from military service, "couldn't be more beautiful," Tebar said. "I particularly love it because it has everything."

But Adina's second-act barcarolle with Dulcamar, the quack who is selling the "elixir of love," is a treat on several levels, sung to entertain the village crowd, but also a subliminal parrying of two people who know how to manipulate and recognize that in each other.

Unspoken, but obvious, is the high musicality of Donizetti'a score, which Tebar was detailing measure by measure with the musicians during rehearsal last week.

"It's like the pasta, eh?" he declared of one passage, bringing smiles from the players. "You stretch and stretch and then: Chop! Chop! Chop!" 

"It's a comedy. You want to have fun during the rehearsals, too," he said. 

Seadia agreed: "With a great piece like this, Donizetti has given us all the tools to play with. The rest is up to us to fill in, with heart."

'L'Elisir d'Amore'

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 23 and 24

Where: Wang Opera Center, 2408 Linwood Ave., East Naples

Tickets: $35-$95

To order: operanaples.org or 239-963-9050