Disaster at the LA Opera

It's been a delicious week...

The LA Opera wanted to put on a production of Wagner's Ring Cycle for the ages. It took them $32 million to come up with this:


(Das Rheingold)

In better times, LA opera director Placido Domingo (yes, that Placido Domingo) envisioned a Ring Cycle done in collaboration with George Lucas and his Industrial Light and Magic company. The projected pricetag was somewhere in the area of $70-80 million, which even in better times seemed steep. Domingo then asked German theater director, Brecht-protege, and general controversialist Achim Freyer to mount the production. Like Caesar, Freyer said no twice then changed his mind when asked a third time. And like Caesar, both he and the rest of the world probably regrets he ever relented.


(Die Walkure)

Freyer's original draft was estimated to cost $50 million, and even that was (no doubt correctly) deemed too high. The eventual production costed a mere $32 million. But the ensuing results should probably have been seen a mile off. Freyer is very much a director of the 'regietheater' school, in which the director rules the stage like a king and freely reinterprets texts according to his own notions. Having studied so closely at the feet of Bertoldt Brecht, his methods are completely different from anything to which most opera and theatergoers in America are used. Brechts methods of 'alienation' involve keeping the audience at a critical distance from the action: methods that take as much from Classical Greek Drama, Japanese Noh Theater, sacred African rites, and Baroque Masques as they do from any traditional notion we have of what theater means. These notions of theater are less concerned with our traditional definitions of acting than they are with physical theater - mime, puppetry, choreography, et al. The results can sometimes be revelatory, but are quite more often snooze-inducing. Either way, the results would be so untraditional that it would be at best an inadvisable risk for a company so in need of a surefire hit.


(Siegfried)

In addition to directing the LA Opera, Domingo still has a full-time singing career, a part-time conducting career, and is also the director of our own Washington National Opera. While Domingo engaged in the same whirlwind of activity which he's assumed every year for the last half-century, the LA Opera accumulated debt so large that Los Angeles County approved a $14 million bailout so that the LA Opera could avoid bankruptcy with the expectation that the LA Opera would repay the debt over the next three years. Unfortunately, LA Opera's ability to repay the debt requires them to put on productions that will sell. And that ability was further damaged this week...


(Gotterdammerung)

The stars of this Ring Production staged what amounts to something close to mutiny, they went to the Press to say in so many words that 'THIS PRODUCTION STINKS!' Tenor, John Treleavan, and soprano, Linda Watson, are veteran Wagnerian troopers - accustomed to singing five hours a night under heavy lights, through injuries, obscured vision of the conductor in the pit, autocratic directors, and bored audiences. And even in the perilous waters of Wagnerian singing, they say that this production is especially awful, dangerous and inconsiderate to singers. This may well be, in so many ways, the final nail in the coffin of the LA Opera as we've known it.


(One famous critic described the production of Siegfried as 'ridiculous, like some Blue Meanie character dressed up to perform “I Am the Walrus.”')