Bartlett Sher must have logged more than a mile at the Metropolitan Opera when a rehearsal for his staging of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” unfolded in fits and starts one recent morning.
Whenever the singers stopped, Sher sprinted. Sometimes up the stairs by the orchestra pit, with notes for the cast. Sometimes down the auditorium aisle to confer with a team working on consoles and laptops. He had a growing list of things to fine-tune: the paintwork of the set, the lighting, the layering of the busy action of a party scene.
“I need another month,” he said, pausing for a closer look at the stage.
Instead, Sher had about two weeks to spare. His “Rigoletto” opens December 31, part of the Met’s annual New Year’s Eve gala, with Daniele Rustioni conducting and Quinn Kelsey in the title role. This staging, a co-production with the Berlin State Opera, premiered in Germany in June 2019. But so much has changed in transit that it has been virtually rebuilt from scratch – down to the wire and under threat from the Omicron variant.
Sher’s new “Rigoletto” — a busy Tony Award-winning director whose work is currently on Broadway (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) and soon to hit the Lincoln Center Theater (“Intimate Apparel”) — is its third on display at the Met this century. Piotr Beczala, the tenor starring the predatory Duke of Mantua, jokingly said in an interview that he is “the Duke on duty here”: In 2006, he made his corporate debut with the role in the 1989 Otto Schenk production, and it started in 1989 Michael Mayer’s Rat Pack “Rigoletto” in 2013.
That’s a lot of turnover for a house where some stagings linger for decades. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said there is no “standardized thinking” behind replacing productions. Two, Franco Zeffirelli’s lavishly traditional interpretations of “La Bohème” and “Turandot,” aren’t going anywhere, Gelb said. But he’s noticed that audiences tend to lose interest more quickly in modern updates — like Mayer’s “Rigoletto,” set in 1960s Las Vegas rather than the libretto’s 16th-century Italy.
Declining interest wasn’t the only problem with Mayer’s production. The muddled dramaturgy stunned critics and it developed a reputation as a neon-lit spectacle of little substance. Reviewing the premiere, Anthony Tommasini of DailyExpertNews wrote that the concept was “barely daring” and “not even that original”. When it was notable, it was like a vehicle for guest artists — including soprano Rosa Feola, who made a sensational Met debut in 2019 as Rigoletto’s daughter, Gilda, and is now returning to that role.
Like Mayer, Sher transposes the action from the opera, but to Weimar-era Berlin — a “pre-fascist world,” he said, of unchecked cruelty, crime, and extravagance. He avoided placing the work under Nazi rule, opting instead for the 1920s, the same milieu as the hit TV series “Babylon Berlin”: a society on the brink of upheaval. The period was followed by the Dukes and Duchesses of the libretto, while Sher was able to explore “how corrupt leadership infects a culture, infects how wealth and privilege dominate and crush people beneath it.”
Sher’s ideas hit a roadblock in Berlin. He planned for the set to spin on a turntable, for cinematic transitions and fertile divisions of public and private spaces. It ended in its place, an Art Deco nightclub with murals adapted from works by George Grosz, who caricatured the corruption and complicity of the era.
The best music of 2021
From Lil Nas X to Mozart to Esperanza Spalding, this is what we loved listening to this year.
“It was more static,” Sher recalls, “and harder to let go of what was in the music.”
Reviews from the German press were harsh, and several were dismissive of Sher as an American. I had my own production issues, writing in The Times that Sher’s treatment of the Weimar Republic came across as “more of a context than a concept.”
Sher admitted that his Berlin staging had room to grow, especially in the way the psychological complexity of the work could be communicated. But he was happy about it.
“I felt it was fair, and it was obvious,” he said. “A good artist should accept the limitations of each iteration of what they do. And this was like the workshop production to fall in love with work.”
He has now had the chance to revise his production as he might during the preview performances of a musical, a luxury that opera is almost never afforded. (One exception is “Intimate Apparel.”) His intentions for the Met revival are largely the same, he said, but it will differ from Berlin in crucial ways.
Finally he has his turntable, and therefore a completely different set; indeed, the first view, during the prelude, is of a grungy brick exterior rather than the explosion of color within. Gone are the Grosz murals, replaced by scorching red marble — a problem with the artist’s estate, Sher said, though the decorating curtain, taken from a Grosz painting, remains.
The cast only recently started rehearsing with the spinning nightclub on stage. Previously, they were preparing in a basement studio with only suggestions of it — a door frame, a pillar — and Sher blocked their movement while telling how the set would run. A copy of “Le Roi S’Amuse” (“The King is amused”), Victor Hugo’s play that inspired the opera, was on hand for reference. Rustioni sat on a stool, waving his baton and singing along by heart. (During intermissions, he turned to the left to study Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” which he will conduct at the Met from January 8.)
Beczala, who was days away from the opening of Massenet’s “Werther” when the Met shut down in March 2020, was back there at rehearsals for the first time since. And Kelsey, a fixture at the house for over a decade, braced himself for his biggest role yet — “my first real starring role,” he said. Many of the cues Sher gave them during the basement rehearsal were about making the opera’s complex opening scene more transparent.
Clarity is a hallmark of Sher’s work, whether the production is “Rigoletto” or “South Pacific”. He said it’s something he aspires to “release the power and truth of the opera, and hopefully add a layer of meaning from today’s resonance.”
After a pause, he added with a laugh, “No problem.”
That resonance, Kelsey said, is very present in the production. “It’s so surprising how that reflects a lot of what we’re feeling in our country right now, no matter which side you’re on — just the tension itself,” he added. More complicated is the dynamics between the main characters. Rigoletto believes the tragic events that led to his daughter’s death are the result of the curse of a disgraced nobleman. But the opera is not so simple.
“I like to say the Duke is polyamorous, but he hasn’t worked out his ethical non-monogamy,” Sher said. “He just goes all over the place and then drops it in a second, which is really dangerous. But Gilda, this poor innocent girl, is already being manipulated by her father’s ridiculously over-the-top love, and she’s in a washing machine between him and the duke. The great journey for me is to find out how I can give her some power over these men who dominate her.”
Behind all this is the score, which opens with the theme of the curse and never really emerges from that darkness. “Verdi was so proud of the curse,” Rustioni said. “You see it repeated, the dotted rhythm comes back when Rigoletto sings. It’s like an idea fixe.”
One of Rustioni’s restorations to the opera—like an oft-cut cadence in a first act duet for Gilda and the Duke—is keeping a line of Rigoletto as a series of C notes, rather than ending in a higher E-flat. , to echo the curse motif.
“I think the production is very respectful of Verdi,” Rustioni said. “Everything is built into the music, and this constantly changing, rotating element helps carry the atmosphere.”
Sher said his set’s “cinematic movement” was his way of achieving “a mise-en-scene that ripples through the music and lyrics.” Ideally, he added, “with enough time, you can do really well. We’ll see.”
One obstacle could stand in his way. About 10 days before opening night, the Omicron variant quickly spread through New York City. Lines snaked around the test site blocks and panic sparked a run on home test kits. Broadway shows were in a precarious state of anticipation and sudden cancellations, and the legendary “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” ended prematurely due to breakthrough infections in the cast.
The Met, which has not yet had to cancel a gig, has taken every possible security measure — a vaccine mandate with no exceptions, with a booster requirement looming in January, and twice-weekly testing within the company — and Gelb said he had been “extremely euphoric” until recently. confident’. Now he feels a kinship with the unfortunate Rigoletto.
“He has his curse that is ruining his life,” Gelb said. “We are all under a greater curse: we have the curse of Omicron.”
