What to do Saturday morning is complicated this year. At 11 a.m., you can participate in the big downtown Durango march and make a personal statement about the incoming administration. Or, you can celebrate the arts by attending The Met: Live in HD. If you have a political conscience and want to support the arts, it’s a tough choice.
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Charles Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” will be a stunner. It offers a fresh take on a classic story of civil strife, rival factions and teenage lovers caught in the crosshairs. The Met hired American stage director Bartlett Sher to reimagine Gounod’s masterpiece.
In 1867, French Romanticism seemed to be in full bloom. That year, Gounod’s version of a great literary tragedy opened in Paris. Based on Shakespeare’s play and adapted by librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, Gounod’s interpretation of doomed love focuses on the lovers. It’s an opera of duets, and the music has a quality of iridescence, a mixture of dark and light, ardor, passion, even joy.
The emotional richness is not unlike Mozart’s complex rendering of “Don Giovanni.” Gounod had seen a production of Mozart’s opera, and according to personal letters, he was stunned by its heady humanistic mixture of intense feeling. While “Roméo et Juliette” drives toward the inevitable ending of a double suicide, periodic flashes of light diffuse the gloom.
Last summer, the Santa Fe Opera time traveled to the decade of the opera’s inception – but on American soil during our Civil War. In a dark, cold mausoleum, two white coffins dominated center stage. In the unusual overture-prologue, a chorus of mourners assembled to sing the backstory. In 1867, having the chorus describe in flashback what had happened, was a stunning innovation in concept and composition. Then the music suddenly shifted, and the great Capulet ball unfolded with a massive on-stage costume change. The magical, love-at-first-sight meeting of the principals followed.
The Met’s production has been reimagined by Sher in 18th-century Verona. The Montague-Capulet feud takes place in a great Italian piazza surrounded by elegant palazzos, balconies and colonnades. Sher and his designer, Michael Yeargan, use billowing white sheets to sail and float into the piazza to create both communal and intimate moments. The online video replays suggest a highly theatrical presentation.
A lot has been written about the central pair in the Met production: tenor Vittorio Grigolo and soprano Diana Damrau. More 30-something than 15-something, their onstage chemistry is becoming something of a legend. Four splendid duets carry them from sparks of first love to a solemn, final commitment in their shared death.
The five-act opera runs about three hours and has one intermission. Some discrete cuts have been made, most notably the once obligatory ballet so much a part of French conventions. Depending on your preferences, the absence of a superfluous ballet may be welcome news. Sung in French with English subtitles, this is one beautiful work you don’t want to miss.
But if you love opera and want to show up for the Durango march, Saturday’s choice is difficult. I’m trying to figure out how to do both. In either case, an undercurrent of political confusion, strife and concern for the future runs through the lot.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theater Critics Association.
If you go
What: The Met: Live in HD presents Charles Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.”
When: 10:55 a.m. Saturday.
Where: Vallecito Room, Student Union, Fort Lewis College.
Tickets: $23 general admission; $20 for seniors over 65 and children; $5 for FLC students with ID, available at the door, online at www.durangoconcerts.com, by phone at 247-7657 or at the Welcome Center at Eighth Street and Main Avenue.
More information: Running time: three hours. Sung in French with English subtitles.
