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Opera Production, Old and New

12 classes

Opera today offers a wider range of dramatic experience than possibly any other medium. It can be a feast for the eye, involving a lavishness of setting seldom found in straight theater. It can challenge the audience with new ideas. The task of the director today is to support the music, tell a dramatic story clearly, and persuade the audience to care about it. This may just be a matter of freshening up a traditional approach; it may involve looking back to the performance conditions in which the opera was created; it may mean finding new metaphors relevant to the concerns of our time and technology of our stages. As a stage director myself, I have chosen operas that have been given at least one production that is truly extraordinary; we can sometimes even compare the same scene in different versions. Whether the approach is meticulously historical, playful, or downright provocative, I can guarantee twenty-four hours of visual excitement, and plenty to argue over afterwards.