3 days to the Fille premiere!

With only a few more days to opening night, director Laurent Pelly is busy putting the finishing touches to his production. “We still have some work to do, especially with the chorus,” he says, coming from a rehearsal on Wednesday. “It’s harder for them, because the rest of the cast has already done the production in London and in Vienna, and they have been very busy with Satyagraha these last few weeks.” It’s not an easy staging to learn. “You know,” Pelly continues, “this production is a little special because it’s somewhat more like theater than opera. The set is really simple, so the movement and the acting of the soloists and the chorus are very important. Everything must be very precise, the chorus has to react to the text of the soloists, and the other way round. But it’s getting better and better!”

Everyone who has seen the production in Europe agrees that it’s one of the funniest stagings to be seen in an opera house in recent memory. Much of the credit for this goes to Pelly and his collaborator, Agathe Mélinand, who not only serves as Associate Director, but who also wrote completely new dialogue for the piece. “The adaptation of the text is funnier than the original, which is a little old-fashioned,” Pelly explains. “But,” he adds, “the main reason is really Natalie. She’s very funny, she has a great sense of timing for comedy, and she has a personality very close to the character of Marie. Marie is her, really.” As in every good comedy, however, laughs aren’t everything. “You need a sense of character and story,” the director says. “Marie is comical and moving at the same time, and Natalie has that, something between comedy and something more dramatic. We took the piece very seriously. If there’s a secret about why it works so well, that’s probably it.”

4 days to the Fille premiere!

La Fille du Régiment features a very unusual set design. The mountain landscape in which Marie and Tonio meet is made of giant folded maps. It’s an idea taken directly from the story, set designer Chantal Thomas explains. “Fille is a comedy, but it’s also a story of war,” she says during a rehearsal break. “The military were the first to make maps, so it seemed like a good idea for the visual concept of the show. And I like the contrast between the huge maps and the human scale of the characters. I think it gives a story a new perspective.” Donizetti and his librettists originally envisioned the opera to take place in the early 1800s, but the Met version is set during World War I. “The Napoleonic Wars are very far away for us today,” Thomas remarks. “There a few direct references to the period in the libretto, it’s not that important. So we decided to move the setting to another period that would feel closer to us but still be removed enough to work within the context of a comedy. The important thing we were going for was a kind of abstract ‘soldier look’.”

Thomas and director Laurent Pelly found most of the maps used in the set in an Army Museum. “We scanned them and made a few improvements to various details, especially names,” she explains. “Then we had large printouts made that were fitted to frames. It was all built pretty quickly.” For the Met stage, a few adjustments were made. The “mountains” in the background are higher than in London and Vienna (where the production was previously seen). “The auditorium of the Met is flatter and has different sightlines,” Thomas says. “There are more people sitting downstairs, so we thought it would make sense to make our mountains a little bigger.”

5 days to the Fille premiere!

“It’s fun,” says Juan Diego Flórez, “it’s real fun!” The Peruvian tenor sings Tonio, the young man in love with the title heroine, in the Met’s new production of La Fille du Régiment, which opens on Monday. “We did the show in London first, then in Vienna, and now at the Met,” Flórez continues, “and I think we really made an intelligent comedy.” Laurent Pelly’s staging has been hailed as one of the funniest opera production in recent memory, and the tenor agrees that it’s something special. “We have a great director and a very good cast,” he says. “I have done Fille before, but never with such an actress as Natalie Dessay. Marie, the girl I’m in love with, has to be a tomboy, and I never saw a real tomboy until I worked with Natalie.”

Check back for more backstage news and interviews as we make our way to the Met’s final new production premiere of the season.