The Directors’ Cuts

The twin gray pillars of a highway overpass tower toward the proscenium on either side of a cinder-block tenement building. Graffiti stakes its claim on a lower wall, not far from the neon bar sign, while a clothesline sporting jeans, shorts and a dress shirt hangs above.

A group of men, women and kids, including one guy on roller blades, mills about near a stand selling Fritos, chips and Coke. A fire-engine-red convertible sports coupe is parked upstage, and a beat-up camper-trailer rests downstage amid a clutter of trunks.

The setting is a neighborhood where a traveling company of variety players has temporarily thrown down anchor. But it’s hardly the bucolic encampment of a late 19th century commedia dell’arte troupe that veteran opera-goers might expect.

This is not your father’s “Pagliacci.” It is Franco Zeffirelli’s.

The new Los Angeles Music Center Opera production of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s popular verismo standard--which opens Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and stars Placido Domingo--marks the director-designer’s L.A. operatic debut.

And it’s far from a traditional period approach to the 1892 work.

“I have a very contemporary vision, a present-day approach to the piece,” said the engaging Italian director, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, as he held forth by the pool at the Hollywood Hills home where he is temporarily quartered, while twilight gathered one recent evening. “This production happens today, in a suburb of Naples.”

Although better known here and throughout America as a filmmaker, Zeffirelli is also one of the most widely seen opera directors of his time. He has created nearly 100 new productions in major houses throughout the world--10 of which are in the active repertory of the Metropolitan Opera alone--and has worked with great stars from Maria Callas to Domingo. He has also made opera films, including “La Traviata” and “Otello.”

But Zeffirelli is, in many ways, one of the last directors you would expect to find doing an update.

“I’m against ‘Hamlet’ in modern clothes or [making the heroine of] ‘Traviata’ like a hustler today,” he says, referring to the contemporary fashion of re-dressing classics.

“These productions are so confused, so abstract,” he says. “I haven’t been [taken] by the egomaniac idea of ‘Yes, it is Verdi, but it’s old-fashioned, so let’s Brecht the whole thing.’ I was never tempted to do a ‘Boheme’ where Mimi dies of AIDS.”

His objections to most updates notwithstanding, Zeffirelli believes that “Pagliacci,” which centers on marital infidelity culminating in murder, is a different matter. Leoncavallo’s melodrama is one of the earliest works of the verismo school--a late 19th century opera movement whose emergence paralleled that of naturalism in the novel and foreshadowed mid-20th century realism in the theater--and actually slightly predates the genre’s true beginning.

“ ‘Pagliacci’ was the first realistic opera,” Zeffirelli says. “Leoncavallo invented, without really knowing or being fully aware [of it], verismo. Opera could be real. It could tell of people today, not just romantic fantasy.

“ ‘Pagliacci’ was born as a document of real life, from a story that the author read in the paper,” says the director, who has created three previous stagings of the same opera, the first in 1959. “So I felt absolutely justified and motivated in bringing it closer to us. ‘Pagliacci’ is a piece that works better [reset] than if you do it in the period when it was written.”

*

It may be somewhat ironic in view of his avowed devotion to the classical style of interpretation, but in bringing the tale of the cuckolded clown into the world of today, Zeffirelli is right in step with current operatic fashion.

Owing in large part to heightened concerns about the aging of its traditional patron base and the difficulties of attracting new audiences, opera has, in the past decade or so, seemed increasingly receptive to provocative stagings and programming, often with innovative, crossover directors at the helm.

L.A. Opera, with one or two outings (out of about seven total productions) each season in the “new and unusual” category, has made its mark as a company that is a part of this trend. It has presented new operas such as Peter Sellars and John Adams’ “Nixon in China,” although not as premieres, and new productions such as last season’s abstract symbolist version of “Der Fliegende Hollander” (The Flying Dutchman) by Julie Taymor. It has matched grand opera with movie directors such as Herbert Ross, whose “La Boheme” was mostly traditional even if the choice of director wasn’t. And it has enlisted visual artists such as Gerald Scarfe and David Hockney to do design and, in Hockney’s case, directing as well.

Cultivation of the unexpected has, in fact, been part of L.A. Opera’s game plan from the get-go.

“I wanted to begin as we intend to go on and not start just with warhorses done traditionally,” says Peter Hemmings, the opera’s general manager since its inception in 1986. “I thought we better let people know what we stood for from the start.”

The payoff, Hemmings says, is visibility: “What I do think we’ve been able to do in the 10 years is to put ourselves up there with the big boys. I don’t think we would have done that if we had merely done very popular operas in a traditional way. That would have been a denial of the challenge that Los Angeles represents.”

Long without an opera to call its own, L.A. was overdue for a company to set down roots.

“It’s a long process to build up a faithful audience,” Hemmings says. “We have currently about 14,000 subscribers, of which about 60% buy everything.

“I do think the opera audience is a lively and developing one. And I don’t think that the occasional injection of some controversy is necessarily a bad thing.”

But it is, and has always been, a matter of striking a balance. If L.A. Opera wants to take risks, it doesn’t want to take too many. The most secure houses (the Metropolitan in New York and the San Francisco Opera, for example) and those with the least to lose (such as Long Beach Opera) are ahead of Los Angeles when it comes to the avant-garde.

“We have quite a difficult knife edge,” says Hemmings. “The bulk of our subscribers are traditionalists, and that’s why they’ve been coming to opera for so long. Many of them are quite prepared to have an open mind. But I think there’s a limit to how much one can tax and tease our regular audience.”

Even Sellars, the most famous opera mold breaker of them all, is sympathetic to the problems. “You’re always on a delicate moral edge,” he says, when it comes to rethinking opera.

Opera and theater director Stephen Wadsworth, an innovator of another stripe, agrees.

“It’s all fine to make a designer mix and throw a famous theater or concept director at an operatic chestnut,” says Wadsworth, who directed Handel’s “Xerxes” at the L.A. Opera in late 1994 and just recently staged Marivaux’s “Changes of Heart” at the Mark Taper Forum. “It all looks great on paper. But it’s basically hit-or-miss.”

*

Hemmings and L.A. Opera’s safest gambit, given the need for innovation and its inherent risks, has been to match the not-so-unusual opera with the unexpected director. For Hemmings, the strategy has also meant capitalizing on what Los Angeles has to offer.

“Since I was coming to an opera company here in Los Angeles, with Hollywood on the doorstep, I was anxious, naturally, that we should work with film directors,” he says.

He has had no trouble finding accomplices: “I have yet to find a director in the theater, television or film who is not intrigued by the idea of directing an opera.”

And Hemmings continues to pursue this agenda. In addition to Ross and now Zeffirelli, John Schlesinger has made a commitment to direct a new, as yet unannounced, production in the near future.

The mix of Wadsworth and Handel’s “Xerxes” was a little farther out on a limb. The all-but-unknown opera was rendered in thorough period style, complete with stylized acting and a detailed theatricality that is seldom seen in opera.

Yet Wadsworth had a positive experience here.

“I was produced with a lot of TLC,” he says. “They really gave me what I needed--time, rehearsal, follow-through--and I think that’s why the show worked.”

Unlike Ross’ and Zeffirelli’s operas, though, Wadsworth’s critically acclaimed production was first mounted elsewhere, at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. “It’s hard to understand what an opera company can do until you create a production with them, which I did not do in L.A.,” Wadsworth says.

One director who, like Wadsworth, works in both theater and opera and who did create a new production at the L.A. Opera is Julie Taymor. Her experience was more mixed than Wadsworth’s--and more telling about the difficulties of taking chances.

Last fall, Taymor’s staging of Wagner’s “Dutchman” received reviews running the gamut from scathing to praising. “I was kind of warned, before I did the ‘Dutchman,’ that there would be a lot of controversy,” she says.

Taymor blames the problems on America’s relative youth when it comes to dealing with opera.

“In Europe, it’s refreshing if you have a new take on it; no one’s going to jump down your throat,” she says. “But because it’s not an old form in America, there’s this idea that there’s a classic way to do it. We were very ambitious, and that’s hard to do under the limits of opera budgets.”

Significantly, given that he lives here and was the director of the erstwhile Los Angeles Festival, Sellars has never created a production at L.A. Opera. In fact, although a number of his recent European opera stagings (as well as a 1994 “Merchant of Venice” and his 1995 music-theater work “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky”) have been set in L.A., only two of his productions have been seen at his hometown opera.

His first production to be seen here was a joint offering of the L.A. Opera and the 1990 Los Angeles Festival.

“I had a very exciting experience doing ‘Nixon in China,’ ” says Sellars, speaking by phone from Paris. “We had been doing it for three years when we did it in L.A. L.A. gave me the opportunity to work on it, and I restaged large sections of it.”

The L.A. Opera was one of six co-commissioners of Sellars’ “Death of Klinghoffer,” a highly controversial piece about the 1985 hijacking and murder aboard the Achille Lauro. The work was scheduled to be seen here in 1991, but it was postponed, then ultimately canceled.

“The reason we decided not to do ‘Klinghoffer’ was because we had to popularize the repertoire in a difficult financial year,” Hemmings says.

When Sellars finally did return to the L.A. Opera, with “Pelleas et Melisande” last year, he received a more mixed response than he had with the popular and critically well-received “Nixon in China.” His “Pelleas” was, as usual, strikingly rethought, an archly postmodern rendition.

From his point of view, though, what really mattered about “Pelleas” was the timing: “The production got to L.A. and O.J. was right down the road. The plot has all the elements of the O.J. case, and it was a pretty charged way of dealing with that. I felt privileged to be doing a piece that could respond to what was on people’s minds.”

As for whether more of Sellars’ works will make it here, Hemmings--who has seen the director’s California-set stagings yet not brought any of them to L.A. Opera--leaves the door open. “I did actually once approach him to do ‘The Magic Flute,’ but he chose to do it in Glyndebourne instead and set it on the Pasadena Freeway,” Hemmings says.

Sellars is currently staging Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” at the Thea^tre du Cha^telet in Paris. The new production is set in a prison not unlike California’s own high-tech, high-security Pelican Bay. The opera, which opens at the end of this month, will be performed in Paris by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its conductor and music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Hemmings says he will go see it and then make a decision about whether to bring the production here.

Sellars, however, tells it somewhat differently: “There were plans, of course, for it to come to L.A., but it’s just been canceled again. It’s been consistently canceled there in L.A. for the past six years.

“ ‘Pelleas’ went through the same thing: on again and off again, three or four times. I have a fair amount of equanimity about this. I’m not holding my breath. I’m sure one day when things are financially better they’ll be able to be a little more wide-ranging in their choices.”

The struggle facing would-be innovators in American opera is hardly limited to Los Angeles. The problems that artists confront here are typical of those they find at most companies in this country.

“All opera houses, wherever they are, really do want to do innovative work,” Taymor says. “But American opera is just not structured to support it. It really is an uphill battle.”

Wadsworth concurs: “There are a lot of people who run opera companies who are interested in having directors come and do their work. But there are very few who are actually interested in giving them what they need to do it right--time and a kind of importance in the process.”

Typically, it is indeed the director’s vision that suffers most.

“The opera world is not designed to ensure directors’ success,” Wadsworth says. “There’s a great deal of love-hate in the business about the function and importance that the director should have, because [opera] is not thought to be principally--or even half, really--a dramatic [event], whereas in fact it is equal parts [music and drama].”

“My choices of repertoire over the years have been very much geared to what kinds of things I can make a fully theatrical production out of,” he says. “For me, the odds of getting it right in opera are just so much lower [than in theater] because there are so many more components.”

These factors include a circumscribed rehearsal period.

“When you get into the [opera house] you have to give away what would, in the spoken theater, be half of your text time to this great big thing called the orchestra,” Wadsworth says. “It commands attention in a way that can compromise that theatrical precision that I’m always interested in seeing.

“Unless it happens that the same kind of attention [is given] to the play and the words as is given the preparation of the music, it’s curatorially irresponsible. Unfortunately, I have to level that criticism at most of the operas produced by the major companies.”

“Everybody wants opera to be on the cutting edge theatrically, but you just don’t do that in three or four weeks,” says Taymor, who staged operas in Japan, Italy, Germany and Russia and worked with such conductors as Zubin Mehta and Valery Gergiev before her L.A. experience.

There are also other reasons why more rehearsal time is needed.

“Singers--who are often theatrically vastly gifted as actors--are almost never trained in any sense of the word that you would think of in terms of actors in the theater,” Wadsworth says. “Singers need to work with people who are strong in terms of the discipline of the text and what the scene is about.”

But no matter how strong the case for more time, it’s just not financially viable.

“Many directors are used, when they work in the theater, to very long preparation periods,” Hemmings concedes. “In opera, that can’t be, largely for reasons of expense.”

And, as if the limits on time weren’t bad enough, there is also the matter of casting. “My work is very demanding physically, so obviously you want singers who are game,” Taymor says. “But you do not have control over casting.”

Several directors who have worked at the L.A. Opera, for instance, have in fact complained off the record of having to make the choice between working with singers who they believed weren’t right, or forgoing a production.

Yet Hemmings reports having received no such complaints, presumably because directors are loath to burn their bridges.

“I’ve never had a complaint from anybody about not being able to choose their cast,” Hemmings says. “I am surprised if any director feels that their concept on a production was jeopardized by the cast.”

When it comes to experimentation, though, there can be too much of a good thing--as some say is now the case in Europe.

“One of the things about the style of production in Europe at the moment is that it’s been getting weirder and weirder--much, much more weird than what is at the moment accepted in this country,” Hemmings says. “It’s a fashion which is going to die out. Sometimes I get the feeling that directors are so desperate to make an impact that they deliberately go overboard.”

Says Zeffirelli: “We are at the end of a tether. Unfortunately, there isn’t sufficient talent anymore to sustain [the experiments]. They keep repeating tricks, each one more extravagant than the one before. Even the critics are fed up with all of that.”

Yet here in the U.S., the forces weighing in against innovation are chiefly a matter of the mighty buck.

Interestingly, the increased stability that comes with having survived a decade doesn’t point toward more experimentation at the L.A. Opera. There is an imperative for the company to make use of what it’s already got.

“We now have a library of some 30 productions,” Hemmings says. “We kept them in order to revive them and to capitalize on the cost of what we did.”

Then too it’s not easy to scrape up the support needed to create new work.

“We are doing fewer new productions,” Hemmings says. “Quite often, we only do one brand-new production created here in a year.”

In part, that is because such ventures are now typically collaborative, he says, noting that “new productions nowadays are so expensive we have to share them with at least one other [company], preferably two.”

“Now that presupposes that the directors of those companies have the same feeling about how a piece should be done and who should do it,” Hemmings continues. “That is why we do a lot of co-productions with Houston and to an extent with Chicago.”

Cost is everywhere a force of conservatism, even at the mighty Met, the flagship American opera.

“When you have to put a new production of one of the masterpieces into repertory in a major opera house like La Scala or the Metropolitan, you better be sure that it travels, because it’s a big investment,” says Zeffirelli, who has productions dating to 1965 still in repertory at the Met. “I’m doing a new production of ‘Carmen’ [at the Met, in October] and they want it to last.”

So what’s an American iconoclast to do?

“Particularly in this moment in history, opportunities are few and far between,” Sellars says. “Most of the work I’ve been doing in the past few years gets paid for in Europe, where there’s a long-standing basis for that support. Then I try and bring that work to America.

“It used to be that we started these shows in America and took them to Europe --’Nixon in China,’ for example. But already with ‘The Death of Klinghoffer,’ it was going the other way. We started that in Brussels, in the middle of the Gulf War, when, needless to say, no theater in America would have touched it.”

Then again, it’s also possible that it isn’t only innovative or experimental opera that is on dicey footing but the venerable art form itself.

“I’m doing more opera work in the next couple years than I otherwise would have,” Sellars says. “I feel its days are numbered.”

*

“Pagliacci,” Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opening night, Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. $23-$130 (gala: $725-$750). Sept. 11, 14, 17 and 20, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m. (with Placido Domingo); Sept. 22, 2 p.m. (with Vladimir Bogachov). $23-$130. (213) 365-3500.