South Alabama audiences have a full slate of live performances to choose from this October, with a comic opera classic returning to downtown Mobile, a beloved stage drama opening in Chickasaw, and a free outdoor concert planned near the Baldwin County coast. The month’s offerings span opera, community theater and a concert band, an unusually wide spread of genres for a single stretch of weeks, and every one of them is staged within an hour’s drive of the bay.
Mobile Opera brings back “The Barber of Seville”
Mobile Opera is staging Gioachino Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” a comic opera that has remained a favorite for two centuries and gained even wider recognition thanks to its long association with Warner Bros. cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny. Generations of Americans who have never set foot in an opera house know the composer’s “Largo al factotum” from the rabbit’s chaotic stage appearances, and Mobile Opera’s production is a chance to hear the full score that made the tune famous.
“When everyone, including Bugs Bunny, has covered an aria, you have to know that it is a keeper,” said Mobile Opera Executive Director Scott Wright. Few works in the repertoire have demonstrated that kind of staying power. Premiered in Rome in 1816, “The Barber of Seville” has never left the world’s stages, and its overture alone has become one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music in the world.
The story follows Figaro, a village barber and jack-of-all-trades, as his romantic scheming and elaborate deceptions spiral into comic chaos. Figaro’s plot to unite Count Almaviva with the ward of the suspicious old Dr. Bartolo, outwitting the doctor’s own designs on her hand, runs on disguise, quick thinking and escalating absurdity, and the opera’s pace never lets up from the overture’s first notes to the final reconciliation.
The production features an eight-person cast and an all-male chorus under stage director Eric Gibson, a veteran of several past Mobile Opera productions, including a version of “The Mikado” reimagined inside a Japanese hibachi restaurant. “[Gibson] is brilliant at comedy and you can always count on him to make the details count,” Wright said. A compact cast suits the work’s fast-paced, ensemble-driven comedy, where timing matters as much as vocal polish and every character is on stage in the service of the joke.
Performances are set for Oct. 19 at 8 p.m. and Oct. 21 at 2 p.m. at The Temple Downtown, located at 351 St. Francis St. in Mobile. The historic synagogue-turned-performance-venue in the heart of the downtown historic district has hosted the company’s productions in recent seasons, and its acoustics have made it a favored room for intimate opera. Tickets are $45 and $30, with $10 tickets available for students. Those interested can call 251-432-6772 or visit mobileopera.org for more information.
Chickasaw stages the story of Helen Keller
Alabama natives have long taken pride in Helen Keller, the Tuscumbia-born author and advocate whose early childhood was upended by an illness that left her blind and deaf before she turned 2. Her life changed when teacher Anne Sullivan arrived at the Keller family home in 1887, beginning a relationship that helped Keller eventually become the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. The word Sullivan famously spelled into the girl’s hand at the water pump, “w-a-t-e-r,” remains one of the most celebrated moments in the history of American education, and Keller went on from that breakthrough to a lifetime of writing, lecturing and advocacy for people with disabilities around the world.
That story is the basis for “The Miracle Worker,” playwright William Gibson’s stage adaptation of his own 1957 “Playhouse 90” teleplay, itself drawn from Keller’s autobiography. The show dramatizes the difficult, breakthrough-filled early partnership between Keller and Sullivan, the half-feral child locked in a silent world and the half-blind teacher who refused to release her from it. Since its Broadway premiere, the play has become a staple of school and community theater across the country, prized for its emotional force and its two demanding central roles.
Chickasaw Civic Theatre will present the show at the Lola Phillips Playhouse, located at 801 Iroquois St., running Oct. 12 through Oct. 21. Friday and Saturday performances begin at 7:30 p.m., with a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. Tickets cost $15.75, or $12.50 for students, seniors and military. For tickets or more information, call 251-457-8887 or visit cctshows.com.
The production gives the community theater in this small Mobile County city one of the most recognizable titles in American drama. Chickasaw Civic Theatre has operated for decades as a volunteer-driven company, and the Keller story carries particular resonance in Alabama, where Keller’s birthplace at Ivy Green in Tuscumbia draws visitors from around the world and where schools teach her life alongside the state’s other foundational stories.
Baldwin Pops plays a free concert at the beach
For those closer to the coast, the Baldwin Pops Band will perform a free concert on Oct. 14 at 4 p.m. at the Orange Beach Library Green, 26267 Canal Road. The outdoor venue beside the public library has become the community concert space on the western end of the beach city, and October’s mild evenings make it the kind of weather outdoor music is made for.
The program includes selections from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” and Justin Hurwitz’s “La La Land,” along with works by Henry Mancini, Pierre La Plante and William G. Harbinson. The pairing of the classic Broadway score with the music of a contemporary film hit gives the concert an easy bridge across generations of American popular music, from Bernstein’s New York streets to Hurwitz’s Los Angeles dreamers, with Mancini’s timeless film themes in between.
The concert is sponsored by the city of Orange Beach, and the Baldwin Pops Band receives additional support through a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. More information is available at baldwinpops.com or by searching for the Baldwin Pops Band on Facebook. The band, made up of volunteer musicians from across Baldwin County, has spent years building a following with free community concerts in Fairhope, Daphne, Foley and the beach communities, and the library lawn shows routinely draw families with lawn chairs and coolers alongside the band’s regular attendees.
A month for every kind of audience
Together, the three performances give South Alabama residents an opportunity to take in opera, drama and orchestral music without leaving the region, from downtown Mobile to the Gulf Coast library lawn in Orange Beach. That range is easy to overlook, but it reflects the depth of the performing arts infrastructure that has grown up along the coast, from the professional companies in Mobile’s historic district to the volunteer ensembles that play city parks and library lawns across Baldwin County.
The economics of the three events also tell a story about how the arts are funded here. Mobile Opera’s tickets, $45 and $30 with $10 student seats, reflect a professional company that must pay singers, directors and musicians, and the student pricing is a deliberate investment in building the next generation of audiences. Chickasaw Civic Theatre’s $15.75 tickets cover the costs of a volunteer company in a small playhouse where the labor is donated but the royalties, sets and lighting are not. The Baldwin Pops charge nothing at all, relying on municipal sponsorship and a state arts council grant to put a concert band on a public lawn where anyone can walk up and listen.
Together they show the three tiers that sustain live performance in a region this size: ticket-buying audiences, volunteer labor and public subsidy, each carrying a different share of the load. The same residents often support all three, attending an opera in Mobile one weekend and a free lawn concert the next, and the organizations depend on that overlap to keep their calendars full.
Why October fills the calendar
The concentration of performances in a single month is no accident. October brings the first sustained stretch of comfortable weather to the Gulf Coast after the long humid summer, and arts organizations across Mobile and Baldwin counties have long scheduled their season openings for it, knowing that audiences return to indoor venues and outdoor lawns alike once the temperature breaks. The month also sits ahead of the winter holiday rush, giving companies a window to build momentum and subscribers before the year-end crunch.
For the organizations themselves, fall openings carry extra weight. Season premieres set the tone for the year, determine whether subscribers renew, and establish the box-office momentum that carries smaller companies through the lean winter months. A comic opera, a classic drama and a free band concert all opening within days of each other amount to a collective showcase for the region’s performing arts, and each organization’s fortunes are tied, at least in part, to whether new audiences sample them in October.
Residents planning a month of it can put the three events on a single calendar: “The Miracle Worker” running across two weekends at the Lola Phillips Playhouse in Chickasaw, the Baldwin Pops on a Sunday afternoon at the Orange Beach Library Green, and “The Barber of Seville” in a Friday evening and Sunday matinee pairing at The Temple Downtown. It is a spread of live performance that few metro areas of this size can match, and it comes, as it always has along the Gulf Coast, with a short drive between every stop.