Met’s Herculean task: 4 operas in 48 hours
NEW YORK — It was Friday afternoon, five hours before curtain, and a stylized Japan was taking shape on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. A crew was untangling ropes of cherry blossoms to form the backdrop of Madama Butterfly’s house in Nagasaki.
But a fairy-tale China was waiting in the wings. A truck had pulled off Amsterdam Avenue into a loading dock at the back of the Met’s stage, its 40-foot container filled with the ornate golden roof of the imperial throne room for Turandot ,an over-the-top extravaganza which would start at 12:30 the next afternoon.
Then there were pieces of the Belle Époque sets of Manon crammed into the wings for Saturday evening’s performance. And, fittingly enough, several stories beneath the Met’s stage, bits of the underworld were being stored, waiting for Orfeo ed Euridice on Sunday afternoon.
The Met has always been a miracle. But a new schedule means that the Met sometimes mounts four different productions in the 48 hours between Friday and Sunday evening.
It is a staggering undertaking. Four casts got in and out of 718 costumes over the weekend, with the help of 37 dressers. They wore 201 wigs that had each been prepared — and in some cases rewashed, curled and reset — by hair and makeup artists. A stage crew of 178 was needed each day to build, move and strike the mammoth sets.
3 p.m. Friday: Clearing away ‘La Bohème’
“Ready?” a stagehand asked. “Ready!” a hardhatted crew of nearly a dozen replied in unison, and they began pushing away the Café Momus, the centerpiece of the second act of Franco Zeffirelli’s hyper-realistic production of Puccini’s La Bohème. Before the weekend’s four-opera marathon could begin, the crew had to strike and store Bohème, one of the Met’s biggest productions, which had been rehearsed onstage during the day on Friday.
Duct tape and carpet tacks were ripped up, and the team lifted an enormous floor cloth painted with cobblestones and folded it faster than most people can manage a fitted sheet.
They were making way for more Puccini: the evening performance of Madama Butterfly. One of the most striking parts of the sleek Butterfly set — a mirrored ceiling that gives the audience a second perspective on the action — was hanging 100 feet above the stage, in the area known as the flies.
4:07 p.m. Friday: Teeing up props
“I hampered it all up,” Anthony Diana, who handles small props, said as he walked through the toy-store-like room backstage where he had gathered four operas’ worth of props, placing them onto shelves and into rolling canvas carts.
The Bunraku-style puppet that represents Madama Butterfly’s toddler son lay prone in its case. The severed head of the Prince of Persia, a suitor of Princess Turandot who is decapitated for flunking her riddles, lay in a cart.
8:05 p.m. Friday: Marathon begins
The house chandeliers rose, the lights dimmed, the orchestra tuned, the black drop curtain went up, and Madama Butterfly got underway. The naturalism of Zeffirelli’s Bohème was gone, replaced by the sleek, modern look of Anthony Minghella’s staging of Butterfly.
11:36 p.m. Friday: Trucking out ‘Butterfly’
A truck horn sounded and the metal shutters covering the loading dock behind the stage clanked upward. To make room for Turandot on Saturday, the Met had to truck out several containers filled with pieces of the set of Butterfly, which is not due back onstage until Nov. 2.
12:35 p.m. Saturday: Up next: ‘Turandot’
When the Met’s signature gold curtain rose 13 hours later, the sleek modernism of Butterfly was gone, and the opulent chinoiserie of Turandot was in its place — an old-school Zeffirelli production with the cinematic sweep of a Cecil B. DeMille epic.
2:35 p.m. Saturday: ‘It’s like Tetris’
It was the second intermission of the afternoon, and Susan Gomez-Pizzo, a wardrobe supervisor, was backstage, fastening a cape onto the plushvoiced soprano Eleonora Buratto, who plays Liù, a slave girl who is faithful unto death.
After pinning on Buratto’s cape, Gomez-Pizzo ducked into her domain just off the main dressing area, where stacks of shoe boxes are labeled by prima donna and opera (“L. Oropesa ‘Manon’ Sc. 31,” “Ms. Goerke ‘Turandot’ Act III”). In the middle of the room, an electric fan dried some of the previous night’s Butterfly undergarments, which had been laundered that morning.
Then she returned to the stars’ dressing area, where racks of frilly Manon costumes lined the halls outside the dressing rooms, ready to be moved in as soon as the matinee ended.
“It’s like Tetris,” Gomez-Pizzo said.
8:02 p.m. Saturday: Another 15-year-old heroine
A crimson curtain rose and Manon, a potboiler starring the bright-voiced soprano Lisette Oropesa, got underway. When the opera begins, Manon is a girl — like Butterfly, she is only 15 — on her way to a convent. But she falls in love with the Chevalier des Grieux (sung by the fiery tenor Michael Fabiano) and they run off to Paris.
3:13 p.m. Sunday: To hell and back
A blue curtain rose on the season premiere of Orfeo. Critics sat in the orchestra level. Board members sat in their boxes.
Three tiers of seating were on the stage, with choristers playing spirits of the dead looking down on the action in Mark Morris’ production. They were dressed in Isaac Mizrahi costumes that suggest they are ghosts of the great and famous: Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII, Jimi Hendrix. (Brooks Wentworth was the spirit of a tuxedo-clad, tophatted Marlene Dietrich.)
4:45 p.m. Sunday: Curtains
Orfeo, without an intermission, came to a close after a swift 90 minutes with a happy ending and a vibrant dance choreographed by Morris. Backstage, Brooks Wentworth changed out of her tux in minutes and got ready to meet some friends across the street for a drink. She was still lively after her four-opera marathon. “You have energy for the performance,” she said. “And then I’m sure I’ll be crashing in about an hour or so.”