Setting change - why?

[Epigonos]

As a kid I went to the opera with some frequency. My mother loved it and the San Francisco Opera did a two or three week season here in Southern California every year. When San Francisco ceased coming there was little or no opera here for many years.

 

I am visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico during the Annual Indian Market on the third weekend in August with a friend. She has never been to an opera so I purchased tickets to see their production of Carmen. The setting has been changed from Spain in the late nineteenth century to current day Mexico. The gypsies have become Mexican peasant and are no longer simple smugglers but rather cartel drug smugglers. It seems that these types of changes, in all sorts of theatre, have become more and more common and I find it rather jarring. Could someone please explain to me what the director is trying to accomplish? I find it hard to believe that a predominately upper middle class American audience will find it easier to relate to Mexican cartel drug smugglers than to simple old fashioned Spanish gypsy smugglers.

[MrMiniver]

As a kid I went to the opera with some frequency. My mother loved it and the San Francisco Opera did a two or three week season here in Southern California every year. When San Francisco ceased coming there was little or no opera here for many years.

 

I am visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico during the Annual Indian Market on the third weekend in August with a friend. She has never been to an opera so I purchased tickets to see their production of Carmen. The setting has been changed from Spain in the late nineteenth century to current day Mexico. The gypsies have become Mexican peasant and are no longer simple smugglers but rather cartel drug smugglers. It seems that these types of changes, in all sorts of theatre, have become more and more common and I find it rather jarring. Could someone please explain to me what the director is trying to accomplish? I find it hard to believe that a predominately upper middle class American audience will find it easier to relate to Mexican cartel drug smugglers than to simple old fashioned Spanish gypsy smugglers.

 

I think the feeling -- and I'm being general here -- is that the music and the stories are universal and can be adapted to any setting in order to produce a piece of work that can have more to say or something different to say than if just left in the setting of the original. These has been fairly commonplace now in opera for at least 50 years but really got going in the 1970s especially with the landmark production of the Ring in Bayreuth by the late great Patrice Chereau.

 

When done really well it can make you sit and go "I had no idea it could mean that or that it could how me that" ... but at it's worst can just feel like it is done to shock with no real meaning at all.

 

It's not at all about relating to what is on stage but illuminating something you might not have seen before by changing the situations and the setting.

[Traveler North]

Not first time this done. Am involved with theatre in Florida. Last year, the theatre produced "Hamlet" changing the setting to late 19th century Havana to draw on the Hispanic population. The actors had to be bilingual since several performances were done in Spanish. Got rave reviews. Saw it in English and thought it was well done.

[RyanDean]

For a little bit of context: Since at least the 1980s, in each summer season, Santa Fe Opera typically does four operas. Two get "straight" productions. Usually one of these is one of the big name operas, and the other a more obscure piece from a big name composer. The 4th is usually a contemporary opera by a living (or recently living) composer. But the 3rd is almost always a big "concept" production, where the production team (director/designers) reimagine a canonical opera through some big idea (often a historical/cultural resetting, sometimes something more aesthetic/abstract). Often these are helmed by directors who are "hot" on the opera circuit. Usually the straight productions lead the season, with the new piece and the concept show bringing up the rear (ie late August when Indian Market happens). It's just how their season rolls (a little something for both the serious and the casual opera fan).

 

One of my favorite Santa Fe Opera memories was watching, agape, as Tatiana Troyanos (in silver lame space suit) maneuvered a post-nuclear-apocalypse moonscape in Cavalli's LaCalisto. The production made no sense really, even though the production conceit made clever use of the open-air venue's natural night starscape as its celestial backdrop (especially with the knowledge that Los Alamos labs were directly across that horizon). But Troyanos was clearly having no fun at all (and I think she left the run two weeks in). Still, it was a fascinating spectacle to experience.

 

And really: the Santa Fe Opera is always an extraordinary experience in and of itself. So even if the production's terrible, it'll likely be worth the trip up the hill.

[+ beethoven]

Directors and performers want to make their statement (or make a splash and be noticed by the media) by doing something different, even if it makes no sense and is a total perversion of the beloved original. Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" is timeless, but why in Fascist uniforms? Doesn't the director realize that we get the point, even in togas?

A non-opera example is Barbra Streisand's "Happy Days Are Here Again." This song was used by FDR's campaign in 1932, and was designed to help people forget the Depression and look to better days ahead. Streisand made this a dirge! Anything she does sounds great to me, but I thought this was silly. If one had never heard the song before, and had no idea of its historical context, I'd image that he'd still be scratching is head over this.

[MrMiniver]

Directors and performers want to make their statement (or make a splash and be noticed by the media) by doing something different, even if it makes no sense and is a total perversion of the beloved original. Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" is timeless, but why in Fascist uniforms? Doesn't the director realize that we get the point, even in togas?

A non-opera example is Barbra Streisand's "Happy Days Are Here Again." This song was used by FDR's campaign in 1932, and was designed to help people forget the Depression and look to better days ahead. Streisand made this a dirge! Anything she does sounds great to me, but I thought this was silly. If one had never heard the song before, and had no idea of its historical context, I'd image that he'd still be scratching is head over this.

 

I work with a lot of directors in the opera and theater world and I have rarely encountered one whose motivation for their interpretation of a work was "to make a splash and be noticed in the media." The men and women I work with have something truly original to say and I applaud them for those productions that are well thought out and work with the text and the music.

 

I have no interest in productions or people who like productions that have to be slavishly done the way it was done in 1863. That is boring and uninteresting to me. Every generation should re-interpret works. It's what makes theater and opera interesting.

 

When theaters and opera houses just become museums is when they will die.