For most stage directors, enticing audiences towards an appreciation of a work has always been something of an exercise in accommodation. That is, giving recherché knowledge the appropriate context. Style, epoch, provenance, language, politics, philosophy, etc., all amount to considerations that must be grappled with and reconciled, in one way or another, before an audience might find meaning or relevance in a performance. Witness the abiding success of an opera production like the Met’s Franco Zeffirelli Bohème, which takes all the bustle and hubbub of a Parisian street-scape and plops it down on the company’s stage in an effort of exacting verisimilitude. At the same time, consider the ways in which a production like Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin — an austere and hyper-stylized staging that also happens to be one of my favorite productions in the Met’s repertoire — arguably succeeds by emphasizing the universal and archetypal over the specific.
In this case, I’m not talking about the details of singing, acting or music, but rather the onstage creation of time and place, “setting.” And I can’t help but wonder if we’re living in an era of live performance that will amount to the setting-sun of traditional scenery and stagecraft. read more
I’m particularly looking forward to the broadcast of The Magic Flute this week: Mozart’s masterpiece was the first opera I saw, though it wasn’t live but a TV broadcast of the delightful filmed adaptation Ingmar Bergman made in 1975. It is widely acknowledged as one of the most successful filmed operas (and, for that matter, plays) ever, and may well be the perfect gateway film to the perfect gateway opera.
What’s gateway art? Basically, it’s an easy first step into opera, ballet, art film or avant-garde theater, the kind of thing you should start with if you’re either young or older but willing to explore unknown territory. (And don’t think that gateway works are simplistic or artistically inferior. Not only did seeing Bergman’s movie in my early teens start me on a lifetime of loving the arts, but it’s an enduringly charming, poetic, incredibly multilayered masterpiece.) read more
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