Whether you’re a fan of the show or not you’re probably a lot more familiar with the time period than the opera’s original setting of 18th Century Spain. The change of scene is a great fit for this opera that similarly plays on tensions between servants and their masters. Director Tom Diamond and conductor Kevin Mallon have set the story in Edwardian England, so everything has the feel of Downtown Abbey. The production team has done several things in this show to make it accessible and relevant. The Marriage of Figaro is a comedic opera or opera buffa in Italian and this production really embodies the true spirit of this operatic style, opera for the people, both high art and readily entertaining. And what a night it turned out to be! Opera Lyra’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro pulls you into Figaro’s world under the spell of great music and sumptuous setting then holds you rapt from start to finish. Well-acted (by Attal notably, but also by Anne Consigny, as Graff’s worried-yet-disgusted wife) and procedurally sleek, “Rapt” fuses strands of dramatic tension in a shrewd enough way that it even saves its sharpest cuts for the kidnapping’s aftermath, when a well-heeled life laid bare must reconcile with a much different form of enforced solitude.The NAC was teeming with excitement Saturday night as throngs gathered, dressed to the nines for a night at the opera.

Without forcing it, Belvaux juxtaposes the unquestionable cruelty of holding anyone against their will with the cold, socially accepted tactics of the boardroom, where a corporation’s threatened health may get precedence over that of a brutalized if unlikable individual. Suddenly a nail-biting, emotionally charged captivity policier - reminiscent of Kurosawa’s crisp handling of the mechanics of ransom negotiation in “High and Low” - takes on a well-tailored political-economic-privacy dimension. When wealthy, arrogant business scion Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) is grabbed by a crack team of abductors who ask for 50 million Euros in ransom and send his severed finger as proof of their seriousness, the subsequent investigation - by authorities, his business partners and a rabid press corps - reveals an unflattering portrait of Graff’s personal indiscretions (gambling, affairs) and professional acumen. Issues of criminality, responsibility and victimhood get a muscular workout in Lucas Belvaux’s taut French thriller “Rapt,” based on a true story of the 1978 kidnapping of a rich industrialist.

Holding rapt