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L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O
38
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December 7, 2015 - January 17, 2016
A WORD FROM ANN PATCHETT
My books in one sense are very different from one another, but
in another they are all exactly the same. They’re about captivity,
isolation, a group of strangers thrown together who can’t leave.
For example, it’s a home for unwed mothers in
The Patron Saint
of Liars
, a research station in the Amazon in
State of Wonder
, and
the vice president’s palace in South America in
Bel Canto.
Each
novel is all about confinement. I keep coming back to the book
that had an enormous influence on me:
The Magic Mountain
.
Right away when I heard the news in Peru, I thought, “It’s
my story, the story of confinement.” Also because it was such
an un-terrifying terrorist situation: it was a takeover where the
terrorists were teenagers who kept asking for more soccer balls
and take-out pizza. I was very attracted to that.
In the true story, they let all the women go: the staff, most
of the hostages, and all the women. When I decided to write this
story, I thought, “They’ll keep one woman. That would be very
compelling. But who? It would be the most important woman
at the party. Why? Because she’s the entertainment. What is she
doing? A pianist? No, a singer. An opera singer would be the most
international.”
The best thing that
Bel Canto
has brought to my life has
been my relationship with Renée Fleming. When I think about
all the ways this book has changed my life: I’ve gone from midlist
to bestselling author, I’ve bought a house, I have the financial
security to do nothing but write novels. It has certainly put me
in the world of opera, and I’ve had opportunities to see opera all
over the world. People take me seriously as someone who knows
something about opera (which is appalling), and I’ve become a
kind of spokesperson. But all of those things are secondary to my
friendship with Renée, and that is the great prize of this book.
Anyone who has ever tried to make anything out of
Bel
Canto
has failed. I don’t feel bad about this. The book has been
very successful, and I’m not upset it’s not a Broadway musical,
which almost happened twice. It’s almost been an opera. At one
point you could go online and buy tickets at The Santa Fe Opera.
That project fell apart at a very late date. Bringing
Bel Canto
to
the stage has been like herding cats, but if anybody can get the
job done, it’s Renée and Lyric.
MELISSA ANN PINNEY
What makes a world premiere so challenging for a designer?
It’s a challenge to visualize the world before you’ve heard the
orchestra. You’re trying to create something you haven’t heard,
and so much of designers’ work comes as a response to the aural
qualities of a score. You hope you’ve sounded the right tone,
and you get better in guessing at it, but you also can
speak
with
the composer and learn what the music is going to do. So much
music is about time, and so much action onstage is linked to
time. You have to have a lot of conversations with the creative
team, gauging what the passage of time feels like, and that’s very
important in this opera.
DUANE SCHULER,
lighting designer
It must have been wonderful to have the composer present during
the summer technical rehearsals.
As we were writing cues for the transitions, Jimmy would play
what he’d composed for them on his computer – that was excit-
ing. He’s all about making it theatrical as well as great music.
How do you respond to lighting the set for this production?
It’s a set that takes light beautifully. At first it appears realistic,
so we can do light streaming through windows, telling the time
of day and helping to tell the story. Then this normal world is
completely upended, the terrorists arrive, the room becomes less
realistic and I have a world of opportunity. We start using light
and projections to show the passage of time, to reinforce the
feeling of the situation, to help advance the story. Every light
cue is tied to what is happening musically so there is always a
visual and aural connection. We can use light to transform the
space from beautiful, to frightening, to magical and to hopeful.
GREG EMETAZ,
projection designer
How did you create the images that will be projected as
part of
Bel Canto
?
It’s a combination of footage that I filmed over the years, and
also stock footage that’s been manipulated to work with the
production. In some cases you take one butterfly and turn it to
hundreds, a process of layering, so one simple flight of one but-
terfly becomes thousands. A lot of it is about altering the scale
and population of very simple things to make them more epic.
What do the projections bring to this story?
The piece could be very easily claustrophobic because it all takes
place in the same room, the same space. The projections provide
a kind of release from that claustrophobia. They do things like
take us outside, take us to magical palaces, and to some extent
show the passage of time, how long we’ve been there, in the
interludes. But there are a lot of musical moments that take us to
a psychological space, and almost represent the characters’ need
to escape this captivity in their minds, because they themselves
cannot escape. To me, that’s really the role that the projections
play – allowing for psychological escape from their prison.