“I always prefer to search for something within the piece that I have yet to discover rather than simply illustrate what I already know about the opera,” Thaddeus Strassberger explains. The 34-year old director, who at press time is currently mounting a new production of Le nozze di Figaro (set in 1790s Seville but colored by his previous directorial concept of setting this Mozart masterwork in modern-day Iraq; see sidebar “Finding ‘Figaro’” on opposite page) for the Norwegian National Opera, is fast becoming a director singers can expect to see in the press and in the audition room with increasing frequency.
Call it avant-garde, call it experimental, call it Regietheater—the concept of concepts is not new. However, the restaging, resetting and, at times, even recasting or replotting of operas has become increasingly common (to the point of being commonplace) in Europe—and, thanks especially to the new reign of general managers and artistic directors at Lincoln Center, it is catching on in the United States. With Peter Gelb at the helm of the Metropolitan Opera, the past season alone has been fraught with both highs and lows—from Mary Zimmerman’s La sonnambula and Luc Bondy’s Tosca, both heavily booed on their opening nights, to runaway successes in Patrice Chéreau’s haunting From the House of the Dead and Bartlett Sher’s inventive Il barbiere di Siviglia. Across the plaza, director Christopher Alden revamped Don Giovanni at New York City Opera in a myriad of ways, continuing the company’s longer-standing tradition of innovative, provocative stagings.
Strassberger fits into this mix as a director who expands avant-garde opera’s horizons past the U.S.’s major opera cities (New York, Chicago, San Francisco). Arizona Opera (and subsequently Utah and Madison Operas) staged his Die Zauberflöte—set in Egypt in the early 1800s as Napoleon and his troops first set sight on Alexandria and Cairo, a meditation on the enlightenment values of Mozart’s singspiel—to resounding acclaim. “Strassberger’s The Magic Flute wrings every ounce of humor from Mozart’s intention while never forgetting that the storyline revolves around the battle of good versus evil and the ideal that enlightenment brings internal peace,” wrote the Arizona Daily Star.
Though also well received (“Happily, the approach works,” wrote Wes Blomster of the Daily Camera, “for—stripped of opulent trappings—the humanity [or, in most cases, the inhumanity] of Verdi’s characters is laid bare.”), Strassberger’s Rigoletto for Opera Colorado proved to be more controversial in its interpretation. “Rigoletto’s original creation in Venice was rife with troubles,” Strassberger explains. “The censors thought the material was inappropriate for the operatic stage. Verdi disagreed and pushed hard to get his ‘ugly’ vision realized. I felt a passionate duty to follow Verdi’s gut instinct rather than gloss over his intentions for the opera.”
This de-glossing process included the Duke singing “La donna è mobile” surrounded by prostitutes (and singing “Ella mi fu rapita!” flanked by his wife and children), Rigoletto strangling the Duke’s young son, and Gilda dying by a dumpster. Yet, Strassberger maintains that these directorial choices are not made to provoke audiences, but rather to expose the cracks in each of the characters.
“One source of inspiration for my production of Rigoletto was the way each mistake that is made by a character affects not only themselves but those around them who, in turn, ‘infect’ others with their poison,” Strassberger continues. “By illustrating as many of these family relationships as possible onstage, you could literally see the corrosive nature of Rigoletto’s ceaseless vitriol eating away at several generations. Not only did the Duke discuss his infidelities at the breakfast table with his wife, his two young children also silently witnessed. Maddalena likewise has a child—with Sparafucile or someone else?—whom she nurses shortly after killing Gilda. The baby literally drinks the milk of her murderous mother. Monterone’s daughter was disgraced and disowned by being tricked into sodomy with her father for the sake of a cruel joke, and Giovanna—here played as Gilda’s mother—is destroyed by the loss of the only glimmer of joy in her life.”
So is there a difference when directing a rep standard like Rigoletto or Die Zauberflöte? Certainly, as I bring up to Strassberger, the chances of an audience member having seen either of these works in the past is greater than their chances of having seen Rossini’s La gazzetta or Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (both of which he’s directed, in Bad Wildbad and Annandale-on-Hudson, respectively).
“As much as my critics might cringe to acknowledge,” Strassberger responds, “I am very well versed in opera and production history, and must work very hard to make sure my approach to each new production is as fresh as the work requires and doesn’t suffer from mindless reproduction of an image or schema I’ve seen before.”
The conversation turns to Les Huguenots, Strassberger’s recent work with the Bard SummerScape Festival (a work, in the interest of full disclosure, that this author worked on as a supertitles operator). The work received praise and criticism—but fervent reactions from both sides. Protestant characters spent the first intermission picnicking in the house, saying the Pater Noster prior to the start of the third act and dodging audience members who were reminded by the act that, though they may have paid for their tickets, they don’t own their seat or the space they occupy for four hours.
Though possibly the most revolutionary aspect was to leave the work set in 1572. “Les Huguenots is an opera about an established society that conflates religion and government which is confronted by simplistic, uneducated, fundamentalist foreign immigrants. It didn’t require any updating to make the modern political allegory very clear,” says Strassberger. “As a matter of fact, my team and I decided that by updating the production, we would have diminished our intended effect. It seemed much more powerful to let the audience contemplate how little has changed since the sixteenth century.”
Production values such as these are on par with many of the works that remain newsworthy for their controversy. As publicist Amanda Ameer noted, “Everyone hates the Met’s new production of Tosca so much they can’t stop talking about it.” Though some directors appear dismissive towards the reactions, Strassberger welcomes everything from bravos to hate mail. “I think the audience should react to what we have created!” he says. “Booing, cheering, storming out during the first act, receiving letters detailing the writer’s likes and dislikes of an idea of mine—I’ve experienced them all. My favorite by far, however, is the post-production talk-back. I think it’s important that the audience knows that it’s a human being behind all these ideas, not some faceless ‘they’ or ‘them’! And the same goes for me. Even when there are strong disagreements between us, the dialogue always proves lively and informative.
“It’s not a bad marketing device, either—I’ve had conversations with patrons who disliked a production whom I’ve convinced to come back and watch again with new eyes. It must be awful trying to watch a production while you have a mental movie playing in your mind at the same time of some other production.”
Clearly, with Strassberger it’s not about the reaction itself but that there was a reaction at all—and what directors do with that reaction is equally important. Though, he does wonder at the upturn in booing. “I suspect, however, [that it] manifests less a shift of the ‘product vs. experience’ balance and is more likely a superficial imitation of European behavior, like sipping Perrier in the 1980s.”
Working on either side of the divide between European and American audiences has put the drive behind Strassberger’s art into perspective. “In my observation, American audiences differ from European ones in a fundamental way—they think of what happens onstage [as] a ‘product,’ not an ‘experience,’” he explains. “Buying products—shoes, cell phones, cars, houses—[is] a way to externally project who we want to be to the world and is expressive in nature. Experiencing, however, is about absorbing and internalizing and about feeling and reacting emotionally.” This observation spurs the question asked by many: should the director be accountable to the audience or the composer?
The answer, of course, is not so clear cut. “We try to make connections between the audience and the composer. There’s no such thing as ‘page to stage’ without a whole team of director, conductor, singers, designers, etc., giving the ideas form, time, and context.”
He pauses and then adds, “I spend a lot more time with the composer than I do any single audience, however. So if I had to pick sides . . . ”
