Francesca Zambello Ready to Remodel the American Musical

Directress Zambello (Photo: Daniel Chavkin)

"Opera companies are running out of popular operas to put on the stage. Luckily, there are plenty of popular musicals available to produce instead. Musicals are becoming a bigger part of the operatic repertoire: the Vancouver Opera produced a fully staged version of West Side Story last month, American opera diva Deborah Voigt appeared in a fully staged version of Annie Get Your Gun at the Glimmerglass Opera this past summer, and in early 2012, the Chicago Lyric Opera will present Show Boat. James Wright, general director of the Vancouver Opera, says that opera companies “need to be less rigid than we’ve been in the past.” In some cases, that means putting on a Broadway show instead of another La Bohème. Leonard Bernstein, the composer of West Side Story, was one of the first to suggest that musicals were the true American opera, and some opera houses have done musicals in previous decades. But the musical temptation has become greater for classically oriented theatres, even overseas: the Théâtre du Châtelet, a house known for operas and operettas, has recently brought material like The Sound of Music to Paris. It helps that these shows sell; West Side Story did well for Vancouver, and Chicago Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud says that 'when we surveyed our subscribers, almost 70 per cent were very enthusiastic about Show Boat.'....One thing that still distinguishes musicals from operas is that musicals aren’t reinterpreted and updated the way operas routinely are; Francesca Zambello, the director who did the Glimmerglass Annie and the upcoming Chicago Show Boat, experiments more with operas than she does with musicals. 'As long as a work is under certain copyright restrictions,' Wright explains, directors 'won’t be able to do much. But when those run out, these works are going to be fair game.' When directors start deconstructing Les Misérables, we’ll know musicals have really arrived in the opera world." [Source] More about some of the above-mentioned productions is after the jump.

At 76, Jonathan Miller Reveals His Formula For Directing

Jonathan Miller preparing for opening night of Verdi's La Traviata (Photo: Les Bazso/PNG)

The opera legend is directing the Vancouver Opera production of La Traviata, which opens on Saturday, and takes the opportunity to be interviewed by The Vancouver Sun about various aspects of his profession. "'I have a simple formula as a director. It’s nothing more really than reminding singers of what they know already and have forgotten, a re-directing of their attention to Chekhovian detail — the little, negligible actions which are made considerable. This is something I learned as a student working with neurologically damaged patients. After a little while it becomes exactly what I have observed in my children and grandchildren. You don’t direct a child what to do — you put them, for example, into an environment in which English is spoken, and there they are a little later generating perfect English. So the funny thing is that once I start directing the drama, I don’t have to tell them what to do, any more than I have to tell a child to raise its voice at the end of an interrogative sentence. It’s all speech-acts — when we speak, we are in fact performing actions the purpose of which is to persuade, or to apologize. It doesn’t matter whether it is spoken or sung, it is all speech-acts. The intonation of the music takes care of itself, because you already know instinctively what intonation you need to be aggressive, to be apologetic, to be persuasive, and so on.'" He enjoys working the young cast in Vancouver, because as he puts it, 'Some older singers get ossified. They say ‘No, I must stand here, Alfredo would not do that,’ and I always want to reply, ‘When exactly were you last in touch with Alfredo on this subject?’ But if they are young, they will do anything — even act.'" A detailed cast list for the production of La Traviata and video interviews with the director are after the jump. [Source, Source]