Met moves Donizetti opera to decaying American town
NEW YORK: Call it bel canto in the Rust Belt. The Metropolitan opera’s new production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” plucks the ill-fated heroine out of the Scotish hills where Sir Walter Scot placed her in his 1819 novel and where Italian composer Gaetano Donizeti kept her in his opera 16 years later. Instead, director Simon Stone has transplanted her to a contemporary American town whose once-prosperous residents are suffering the effects of economic decline and where the pharmacy and pawnshop are among the only thriving businesses.
“It can feel relaxing to escape and go to a Donizeti opera that’s set in a previous era,” Stone said in a panel discussion at the opera house during rehearsal. “But I think it’s less of a transformative experience than if you can go, “Wow, this is about me, my family, us.’” Stone said he looked for an American equivalent to the original seting and setled on the Rust Belt.
“The novel and opera are about the end of the aristocracy in Scotland, and it became an incredibly poor country very quickly,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to find a place in America where there’s that same sense that the glory days are over, and if you look at the former industrial towns, there’s a lot of drug use, a lot of unemployment. So you have people who are not just desperate, but their pride is wounded.”
Lucia is still lied to, emotionally manipulated and bullied by her desperate brother and his henchmen into giving up her sweetheart Edgardo
and marrying a man for his money. But in Stone’s version she’s also a recovering drug addict who relapses once her hopes for happiness are crushed.
For soprano Nadine Sierra, the updated seting helps her identify with her character. “There’s a portion of this Lucia I absolutely get,” she said in an interview. Growing up in “not the most glitzy” neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she recalls being bullied in school and geting into a series of emotionally abusive relationships with men in her early 20s.
“I feel as if I’m playing myself,” in this production, she said. “How I would react to the way Lucia has to live her life.” Lucia’s reaction is, to be sure, extreme by any measure: She kills her new husband on their wedding night - in this production by striking him with a fire extinguisher in their cheap motel room. (“She grabbed anything she could,” Sierra said.)
That act leads to the famous “mad scene,” an extended showpiece for sopranos notable for the intricate vocal line and elaborate ornamentation that typified the bel canto style of early 19th century Italian opera.
But to Sierra, the term “mad scene” may be a misnomer. “I don’t think Lucia is necessarily crazy at the end,” she said. “I think she’s had enough. She’s so tired of her whole world collapsing on her. … She does murder her husband, but you know these things do happen.”
When Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, decided on a new production of “Lucia,” he said he thought of Stone because he’d been impressed with his work on two theatrical classics, Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Yerma” and Euripides’ “Medea.” “The way he approached the tortured female characters at the center of each of those plays,” Gelb said, “I thought ‘Lucia’ would be an opera that would appeal to him.”
Sierra said as soon as she found out who her director would be, she got in touch with soprano Prety Yende, a good friend who had starred in Stone’s production of Verdi’s “La Traviata” in Paris. “Prety told me it would be a bit more complex, more technological than what we’re used to in bel canto operas,” Sierra said. That may have been an understatement. As in his “Traviata,” Stone makes extensive use of video projections, some pre-recorded and some to be filmed live during performances. These include shots of Lucia painting a portrait in her room (a skill she may have picked up in rehab, Stone said) and dreaming about a life with Edgardo she never gets to enjoy.