Graham Vick is, as we all know, a genius.
He's the guy who imagined Hell as a dilapidated retirement home (Zauberflote) and Paradise -- well, the Elysian Fields -- as a quiet read in a comfy chair in a clean, well-lighted place (Orfeo), who used a 150-year-old opera to explain to us the nature of modern-era celebrity (Traviata) -- loneliness as the reason of Princess Diana's as well as Anna Nicole Smith's death -- and he simply demonstrated that if you show Desdemona die standing up -- instead that reclining, as is usually done -- you can change the entire meaning of the opera. Just with that small thing. His Rigoletto not only beats the not-really-living-anymore cr4p out of Gilda (that's got to hurt>!) but he runs away like hell when he realizes the enormity of what he has done.
And in his staging, Lucia goes insane while walking on an endless crimson carpet of roses -- crazy for love, literally.
We are therefore happy to report that our main man Graham "Opera for Teh people" Vick did it again: in Lisbon, he has uprooted all the seats in the great Sao Carlos theater's platea (with part of the audience in the boxes and part onstage, and all the action on a big platform built over the stalls).
The result: Wagner as hellish circus, Hunding as Hells Angel and the Valkyries as hawt vampires.
It's just awesome that Vick keeps dreaming up new things -- big props to Sao Carlo, whose excellent director, Paolo Pinamonti, an intelligent man and able manager of excellent taste, has promptly been fired just a few days ago. :(
