Last week, during the sometimes-painful Robert Carsen's production of Candide, Opera Chic tried to fight the boredom by doing many things: by leafing through a copy of Japanese Vogue, peeling an orange, and thinking about how brilliant, no, how BRILLIANT Carsen is when he doesn't try to do political theatre which, fo' reals, is so not his cup of tea. Carsen's genius for the dramatic vision and for detail that will break your heart is what makes him one of the (very, very few) greatest opera directors working today, a true man of vision in a business of so many charlatans that only know how to replace their lack of ideas with cheap stunts.
Carsen's Iphigénie En Tauride (a production seen last October in Chicago, it closes tonight in San Francisco) is an example of that. And how emotionally devastating an experience must be to watch Susan Graham on that stark black stage, as naked as Iphigenie's sorrow (Bay Area Reporter review here, San Francisco Sentinel review here, the Examiner's here).
