3 days until the Lucia di Lammermoor premiere!

After the curtain came down on the final dress rehearsal for Lucia di Lammermoor at yesterday’s Open House, the cast and production team assembled on stage for a Q&A session with the audience, hosted by Met radio announcer Margaret Juntwait. Asked whether working on an opera was different from staging a play, director Mary Zimmerman explained that it was mainly a matter of scale: “On a stage like the Met’s, everything is bigger,” she told the crowd, who had shown up for the free day-long event highlighted by the Lucia final dress. “What makes it easier is that I’ve been with the same design team for 15 years now, so we work really well together. The most important difference for me as a director is that with an opera, I’m not in control of the pace of things. In a play, I’m in charge. Here it’s the score.” One audience member wanted to know how soprano Natalie Dessay prepares for her mad scene in the third act. “I don’t prepare,” the French soprano answered, straight-faced. “I’m suffering.” After the laughter died down she went on to explain that, “we had almost four weeks of rehearsal, so we built everything little by little. Mary told me things she wanted, I added things, and so it all came together very well.”

A number of people seemed to be surprised that for the signing of the wedding contract in the second act, Dessay is wearing a red dress. “It’s true that in most productions, Lucia is wearing a white dress for this scene,” costume designer Mara Blumenfeld said. “But that’s not quite accurate. The signing of the contract and the actual wedding used to be two separate events. In our staging, the first scene takes place in the afternoon, with all the chorus members in day dress. The wedding party is in the evening, and for that, Lucia is in a white dress.” While Blumenfeld was doing research for the production, she found out that red was actually not an uncommon color for a wedding dress in the 1800s. “The white didn’t really become standard until the very end of the 19th century.” But there’s another thought behind the red: “It’s also a symbol for blood, it foreshadows what happens in the third act,” the designer explained. “Lucia is being used as a blood sacrifice for her family, and I wanted to show that by having her stand out among all the black, gray and silver in the second act.”

This entry was posted by Philipp Brieler on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 3:31 am and is filed under New Production Countdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.