![]() ![]() ![]() For the Australian director Simon Stone, the modern equivalent of that wild and unknowable north is a Rust Belt town betrayed by global capitalism, the sort of place political reporters throng in election years to interview white men in baseball caps at the local diner. As an urbane Italian composer of the 1830s, Gaetano Donizetti found an inexhaustible source of obsessive passions, vindictiveness, and craving for violence in the Scotland of Sir Walter Scott. As a desperate Lucia staggers through her final breakdown, a prerecorded video shows us the sentimental fantasy unspooling in her imagination - at which point, I wanted to yell Turn that thing off! We don’t need another portal to her brain, since the libretto and the music already tell us what she’s thinking.īut this is a production that never passes up an opportunity to overexplain. By the end, the camera has become a mind reader. In a wedding scene, we simultaneously observe the crowd from a distance and mingle with the guests who, because of an irritating delay in the video feed, sing slightly out of sync with themselves. ![]() She’s not alone in this virtual infinity mirror. We watch herself watching herself, a process that can’t end well. In a no-longer-fresh technique to multiply points of view, an onstage camera crew follows the characters around, sending a live feed to a screen above their heads, so that we get billboard-size close-ups of Lucia’s laptop, her phone, her ritual of primping in the bathroom mirror, even her make-out sessions. In the Metropolitan Opera’s new production, located in a hallucinatory present, that shattering takes place not just on the stage but on many screens, that fractured habitat where so many people now try to survive. Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera about a woman whose sense of herself splinters into shards.
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