Lee Blakeley
Opera director noted for his lively and inventive stagings
LEE BLAKELEY, who has died from a suspected heart attack aged 45, was a British director whose stagings of operas and musicals both in this country and overseas were noted for their visual flair and theatricality; over the past decade his work in Europe had become synonymous with the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where he directed the belated French premiere of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.
For his musicals Blakeley would use a mix of opera singers, artists from Broadway and the West End, and film stars, producing shows that were rich in texture. “It’s definitely a balancing act when working with an interdisciplinary cast but I see it all as ‘same church different pew’,” he said. Eventually his stagings of Broadway musicals, including Sweeney Todd and The King and I, proved so popular that he was exporting them to America.
His staging of Madam Butterfly for Santa Fe Opera in the US was a far grittier interpretation then audiences are used to, set in Nagasaki between 1903 and 1905. The electrification of Japan takes place during Pinkerton’s absence and Cio-cio San lives in less luxurious surroundings than in other productions.
Whether working on an opera or a musical Blakeley insisted that he always treated the work in the same way. “It has to be about the quality of the theatrical story,” he told LA magazine in 2015. “It has to be about the music.”
Richard Lee Blakeley was born at Mirfield, West Yorkshire, on August 16 1971, and educated at Mirfield Free Grammar School. By 13 he was interested in acting and at 18 was accepted into the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
After working in casting management at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, he returned to the Academy to study theatre directing, but there was an administrative error and he was instead assigned to direct a student production of Holst’s chamber opera The Wandering Scholar. “I had no thought of directing opera, but I had success with it and it turned out to be a career changing assignment,” he recalled.
During his finals Blakeley worked with David Mcvicar on Handel’s Semele and later, while working in the box office for English National Opera, he met Mcvicar again, who invited Blakeley to be his assistant. “Then things snowballed,” he said.
Soon he was directing on his own, including, in 2001, the world premiere staging of Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, an early cantata by Handel about a love triangle between shepherds that was performed at Heaven, the London gay nightclub. It was transformed into a modern urban setting featuring a woman and two men, and “there was some blurring of the sexuality of the male characters”, he recalled.
Then came work with Glyndebourne, ENO and the Royal Opera before a staging of Dvorak’s Rusalka at the Wexford Festival in 2007 that made his name. The following year his new production of Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera for Scottish Opera drew rave reviews. “Lee Blakeley’s elegant staging could scarcely be bettered,” enthused The Daily Telegraph.
In the UK he concentrated on theatre work, with his production of Pat Kirkwood is Angry in 2012, about the correspondence between a 1940s music hall star and the Duke of Edinburgh, transferring from the Manchester Royal Exchange to St James Theatre in London and then to the Brits off Broadway Festival in New York.
Blakeley, who had recently acquired a new kitten from Battersea, is survived by his husband, Jonathan Foster.
Lee Blakeley, born August 16 1971, died August 5 2017