GQ Encourages A One-Night Stand With Carmen Based On Bieito

"Calixto Bieito's raunchy production of Georges Bizet's Carmen at the English National Opera proves that opera is no longer for the old (or boring). For those of you hoping to expand your horizons, Carmen is the perfect introductory sampler to whet your appetite and keep you coming back for more. The image of opera-goers squinting into their binoculars with their powdery, wrinkly faces is over. A younger audience is quickly encroaching into operatic territory, and here's why. Opera's saving grace comes in the form of Carmen. Why invest in opera now when we've only just managed to master the musical? Sex, that's why, and lots of it. OK, not just sex, but other themes that we can also relate to such as love (love triangles, unrequited love) and lust....This Carmen could very possibly drive a new (younger) audience to the opera. When GQ saw the production, a lady sitting next to us said, 'It's a bit cruder than I remember,' during the intermission. This surprised us, as Carmen is the definitive story of action fuelled [sic] by sexual tension. The story is almost entirely based entirely on sex, infidelity, and hot-blooded desire. And if that doesn't draw younger people to the opera, we're not sure what will." [Source] For more information about Carmen at ENO, click here. Watch a trailer of the production, and see the full cast performing through July 3, after the jump.

Hopelessly Devoted To You: Don José (Eric Cutler) wants more than one night with Carmen (Justina Gringyte).

Penny Woolcock Discusses Her Latest Project: Dog Fighting

"Her latest gritty film project exposes the shady world of dog-fighting....Of the many distressing scenes in Penny Woolcock's new documentary, Going to the Dogs, which explores the underground world of illegal dog-fighting in Birmingham, one stands out. It's of a young pitbull in training, not out in the city streets – this breed is far too demonised by both press and the police to go for anything even resembling normal walkies – but rather at home, strapped tightly by its lead on to a treadmill....Penny Woolcock is no stranger to the difficult documentary – previous subjects include homelessness and gang culture – but a film about dog fighting, she admits, 'took a great lump out of my heart. There was a period while filming when I felt completely lost, to be honest. I thought it was going to be unremittingly cruel, but the reality was somehow not quite as bad as I'd feared.' The months she spent infiltrating this hidden world were exhausting for Woolcock, now 64. It left her with nightmares, and migraines. For this reason, she has readily embraced the job she has stepped into next. You see, as well as being a film-maker, she is also a director at the English National Opera, and she is currently deep in rehearsals for a forthcoming production of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers. Her second career in opera began late in life, when she was invited – out of the blue, the way she tells it – to direct John Adams's Doctor Atomic at the Met in New York. She went on to direct an earlier staging of The Pearl Fishers at ENO in 2010. 'It's exhausting work,' she says, smiling, 'but I will admit, it's a welcome change from dog fighting.'" [Source] 

No Dogs, Just Fish: Leïla (Hanan Alattar) and Nadir (Alfie Boe) in the 2010 production of Bizet's
The Pearl Fishers at ENO directed by Penny Woolcock. (Photo: Dylan Martinez/The Sunday Times)

HBO's "True Blood" Actress Fiona Shaw Directs Opera

Fiona Shaw easily morphs from
television witchery to a Da Ponte romp
with the greatest of ease.

It should come as no surprise that Irish actress Fiona Shaw, who plays Marnie Stonebrook on the HBO hit series True Blood, would have a connection to opera. Her character on the blood-thirsty drama is described as "...timid and socially awkward medium who serves as leader of a local Wiccan group. She poses a threat to humans and vampires alike." Sounds pretty operatic. But for a woman who has gained famed acting out the roles of Medea, Electra and Portia in Julius Caesar on the world's greatest stages, opera directing seems like a natural extension of her talents. She acted in many plays directed by Deborah Warner who entered the opera arena with works for Glyndebourne, English National Opera and a production of Dido & Aeneas with Les Arts Florissants that played in Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam. There is little doubt that it was Ms. Warner's influence that may have pushed Ms. Shaw toward an operatic directorial debut after a 24-year working relationship with each other. The production was Riders to the Sea, a one-act drama by Ralph Vaughan Willams, that took place at English National Opera in 2008. Since then she has reappeared at ENO to direct Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers in April 2010 and will return to the company in October 2011 to direct a production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Or perhaps it was Ms. Shaw's mother that exerted that most influence on her daughter's decisions. Before becoming a physicist she had another career in mind for herself: opera singer. [Source, Source, Source ]

Read a wonderful article written by Fiona Shaw in 2008 describing why she chose Riders to the Sea as her opera-directing debut by clicking here. Learn more about the actress by clicking here. A complete biography after the jump.

Listen to the complete Riders to the Sea:



VIDEO GUIDE: Listen to Fiona Shaw narrate a specially commissioned short film which gives an introduction to Glyndebourne Opera House; Watch the actress perform a prologue to Purcell's Dido & Aeneas filled with works by Hughes, Eliot and Yeats, at the Opéra Comique in 2009; An interview with Ms. Shaw describing her preparation for Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers; A preview to the upcoming production of Le Nozze di Figaro at ENO with commentary by Fiona Shaw.


BONUS CLIP: Fiona Shaw recorded a PSA, along with other cast members of True Blood, for the "It Gets Better" project:

ENO Invites Writer Will Self to Discuss Internet Dangers

Two Boys
"A teenage boy is stabbed. An older boy is caught on CCTV leaving the scene. An open-and-shut case, it would seem. But, as Detective Inspector Anne Strawson investigates the older boy's story, she uncovers a bizarre nexus of chatroom meetings, mysterious internet identities, supposed spy rings and disturbing cybersex, leading to a stunning conclusion. Loosely inspired by actual events that occured in an English industrial city, Nico Muhly's new opera is a cautionary tale of the dark side of the internet. With a libretto by Craig Lucas, screenwriter of Prelude to a Kiss and Reckless and video design by Fifty Nine Productions, whose work has been a key feature of such recent ENO triumphs as Doctor Atomic and Satyagraha, this new co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, is directed by Tony Award-winner Bartlett Sher, making his UK opera debut. Some elements of this production may be unsuitable for those under 16 years of age." [Source]

Performances: June 24, 27, 29; July 1, 4, 6, 8 at 7:30pm. The cast includes Susan Bickley, Nicky Spence, Mary Bevan and Madeleine Shaw.

As a bonus, watch the composer discuss the work by clicking here.

Christopher Alden Takes on Naughty School Boys in Britten

(Photo: Alastair Muir)

Director Christopher Alden sets Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a boy's school with mixed results: "Thus, Oberon is the pervy, bespectacled Latin master with a pair of underage catamites, one of whom is Puck – Jamie Manton, too old - who turns out to be Theseus when he grows up, emotionally damaged (are you paying attention? It gets worse) and who relives the whole story in flashback whilst staggering around the stage like a slow-motion zombie. Tytania is the boot-faced drab Music mistress, forever vigorously castrating pupils’ writing tools in a pencil sharpener – geddit!!??!! – when not smoking the odd cigarettes which do duty for the 'love-juice' and lounging louchely up against the school’s dreary walls. The four lovers are all schoolchildren in uniform. The mechanicals are the school’s handymen and, I think, Sports master. The staging is claustrophobically confined to a triangular stretch of schoolyard bounded by two giant two-storey walls of classroom windows and corridors (designed by Charles Edwards) inside which the 'Fairies' – the other pupils – line up on both levels in order to make their crucial contributions and from

(Photo: Alastair Muir)

which the staging never once deviates. Bottom is not transformed into an ass, or indeed anything else at all: he merely takes his shirt off and – like everyone else in this miserable, interminable drivel – staggers around in slo-mo a lot, provoking the others’ holy horror for no visually discernible reason. Twenty minutes minimum of “ass” jokes thereby go for absolutely nothing, as does any sense of magic, mystery, atmosphere or, God forbid, fun. The lovers’ weary collapse at the end of Act II is accompanied by the school burning down, which, given that they’re inside it at the time, makes their decision to go to sleep there rather puzzling. The Act III Pyramus and Thisby sequence – performance-proof, I have always found in the past – is rendered so coarsely and grossly as to be virtually unwatchable in its Carry On Crassness (Snug, drunk, pisses up a wall and gets a blow-job from 'Thisby') ." [Source]

English National Opera Presents "The Return of Ulysses"

Tom Randle and Pamela Helen Stephen sing Monteverdi
(Photo: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian)

"In the intimacy of the Young Vic, a venue which seems to have a special gift of reining in and sharpening the more sprawlingly proportioned ENO, this had urgent, if doubtless to many irritating, impact. Andrews, an Australian theatre director, achieves shock impact by assaulting the senses, especially the visual. The use of big screens, as here projecting real-time close-ups, is already an operatic cliche which fights with the action and is best ignored. Stillness is an alien notion. Why stand on the spot to deliver your big, sensuous, ornamented aria when you could run, thrust your groin or, in one case, take your knickers off?" [Source]

High praise for the creative team after the jump.

Film Director Mike Figgis Fails ENO Femme Fatale Attempt

Claire Rutter in the title role Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia at English National Opera

If you had high hopes about the announcement of Mike Figgis making his directorial debut at ENO, prepare yourself for the review of the performance after the jump (more photos as well):