Word: freemans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seems blessed: In 1956, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mozart's birth by staging four of his best-known works, including The Magic Flute, and a company was born. Fifty years later, they have repatriated one of their finest exports, director David Freeman, to launch a new version combining vocal firepower (Amelia Ferrugia, Jaewoo Kim, Emma Matthews) with the aerial acrobatics of Legs on the Wall. Did someone mention crossover appeal? "You can't stay 19th century," says the production's designer, Dan Potra, who shares with his director the belief that opera...
...Audiences, not least of all. Having drawn nearly 300,000 people to his arena operas at London's Royal Albert Hall, Freeman, 53, has helped revolutionize the art form from within. As founder of the Opera Factory, first in Sydney and later in London as part of the English National Opera, he earned his stripes as an avant-gardist, famous for stripping his singers - literally, as in his 1988 Cos? Fan Tutte set on a beach. (Amelia, Jaewoo and Emma, fear not.) But when The Magic Flute opens in Sydney this week, their talents will be similarly exposed. "I wanted...
...final and most popular work - in which Egyptian prince Tamino (Kim) is enlisted by the Queen of the Night (Farrugia) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Matthews) from a secret sect - is also about how appearances can be deceiving. And amidst all the stage pyrotechnics of the new production, Freeman's main focus has been on the singers. "If you don't change the quality of the central performances," he says, "you change nothing...
...Having first trained as an actor at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, Freeman should know. He dropped out to direct, but the experience taught him the importance of long rehearsal periods, something he has campaigned for ever since. At the now-defunct Opera Factory, he was famous for training his singers in yoga, primal screaming and Butoh dance, and his productions successfully broke down the image of a singer plonked on stage. (Musically adventurous as well, Freeman will premiere a hip-hop opera based on the life of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for the ENO in September...
...Amelia Ferrugia ascends on her mechanical moon at a recent rehearsal, Freeman encourages his Queen to command the stage with her gestures ("but not Shirley Bassey ones"). Caught in the folds of her drapery below, Jaewoo Kim is coaxed to treat her presence like perfume. "Can that be more intense?" Freeman later asks. Every now and then, the director drops back to view the scene through the frame of his hands. Such details will make all the difference when his vision is unveiled, and Freeman hopes it will share with Shakespeare the quality of being "both spontaneous and inevitable...