Yuval Sharon stages 12-hour Figaro marathon
NewsFrom the Detroit Free Press:
Michigan Opera Theatre’s staging of “Bliss,” a unique performance that found singers and an orchestra performing the final scene of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” repeatedly without pause for 12 hours, unfolded from noon to midnight Saturday.
It was far from repetitive, however, as it spanned different parts of its staging area and changed a bit with each run-through. Attendees who stopped in at 2 p.m. got a very different show from people who visited at 5:30, 9 or 11:30.
Director Yuval Sharon made the unconventional even more so by staging the production in the Michigan Theatre building, a 1926 structure that was hollowed out in 1976 and transformed into a four-story parking garage with the ornate staging area, upper balcony, projection booth and lobby left intact.
Read on here.
Some readers may find the relegation of a fine theatre into a parking garage disturbing.
Sounds like Satie’s Vexations.
The stage design of the 2010 Arabella in Berlin was based on this photo of cars in this particular derelict theatre.
More disturbing is the idiotic idea itself.
Wagner in an hour, Boheme backward, hours of Figaro [as if it isn’t long enough], clearly Sharon and a the administration think sensationalism will work in Detroit. But will it bring audiences to the core repertoire ?
They played this in LA two years ago: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kjartansson-bliss-fluxus-review-20190528-story.html
Some people really have nothing better to do…
Why?
This is innovative, creative, and traditional too. Mozart would have loved it. Hat’s off.
This action exposes the rotten economic system we have that is at the core of most or our problems.