Word: gockley
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This is opera, right? Absolutely, says David Gockley, general director of the Houston Grand Opera, which has mounted an up-to-the-second production of Georges Bizet's Carmen to show off its new portable outdoor stage, a $1.4 million innovation designed to get the much admired company out of its fancy downtown theater and into the lives of Houstonians who don't know Don Jose from Donald Duck. Gockley calls it "nothing less than a new way to produce opera." Irreverent locals dubbed the show Carmen a-go-go but turned out to cheer. More than 7,000 paying...
...bother? According to Gockley, Houston Grand Opera, which is internationally renowned for its avant-garde productions, had come to be seen by its hometown as elitist. "The political and funding community," he says, "was telling us, 'We know you have a certain stature, but if you don't begin to reach and touch more people, you're going to gradually drop off our priority list.'" So he asked Billington and Foy to create a fully portable stage suitable for special performances aimed at young, TV-oriented viewers unfamiliar with opera. "What does rock 'n' roll do? That was our mandate...
...same logic dictated Gockley's unorthodox choice of director. "They came to me and said, 'Do this opera,' and I said, 'You're crazy! I don't know from opera!'" says Michele Assaf, who choreographs musical comedies and rock videos. But her inexperience turned out to be a blessing. While many directors now treat 19th century opera as an opportunity to stuff unsuspecting audiences full of identity politics (the oppression of Gypsy women under late capitalism, say), Assaf was content to interpret the world's most popular opera as a straightforward tale of love and death. "It's a story...
...Puccini or get a glimpse of Rossini's Cinderella. In characteristic down-home fashion, a TOT invitation for that work urges, "Come see Cinderella win out over her two grasping stepsisters. Come see her wed the handsome Prince." Notes the Houston Grand Opera's general director, David Gockley: "Opera tends to be a stilted, exotic, expensive kind of entertainment that rules out a great deal of the population." Gockley founded TOT in 1974 precisely to break down the high-falutin image that opera still has in the boonies, as well as to create a training ground for emerging...
...performing-arts company in the South is incontestably the Houston Grand Opera (TIME, July 19). In his four-year reign, young General Director David Gockley, 33, has turned the company into one of the seven best in the U.S. The forthcoming season opens with Rigoletto (Oct. 15) but includes such attractions as Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (Jan. 28) and Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea (March 25). Gockley's innovations include the creation of the touring Texas Opera Theater, which has successfully made a home in Texas and five nearby states; next month, for instance, Sousa...