Where the opera’s libretto depicts a decaying and desperate aristocracy in the Scotland of centuries ago, Stone has found contemporary resonances and turned the Met stage into something of a graveyard of the American dream - a landscape of opioid abuse, economic hardship and the last, dangerous gasp of white male power.īoth Stone and Sierra are veterans of European houses, where a production like this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, for example, Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” has a similar look in David Bösch’s 2016 staging, with a group of older men exerting outsize control over their economically depressed community. And risking boos: Luc Bondy’s 2009 “Tosca” is a reminder that playing around with the classics can infuriate a house that doesn’t welcome departures from tradition.Īs Sierra slowly made her way down the fire escape, she was surrounded by fragments of a faded postindustrial town: a drab motel, a pawnshop, a liquor store with an A.T.M.
Many directors have updated classic operas, like the company’s most recent “Rigoletto” stagings, set in 1960s Las Vegas and Weimar-era Berlin.īut by transporting Donizetti’s bel canto tragedy to present-day America for his Met debut, Stone is breaking new ground.
Pretty or not, this mad scene will be different than any “Lucia” - any production, period - in the Met’s history. “She’s covered in blood at this point, so it won’t be as pretty,” Stone said, explaining how Sierra will look when the staging opens on April 23. Simon Stone paused during a recent rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera, looked up at the stage, and surveyed his new production of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Nadine Sierra, singing the title role in a secondhand wedding gown, was preparing to descend the rusting fire escape of an old house for her famous, climactic mad scene.
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