Word: lucia
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...TITLE: LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR...
...program note to her startling, macabre -- and, on opening night, lustily booed -- new production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera, Francesca Zambello cites as inspiration the gloomy tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the brooding landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, both contemporaries of the composer. Maybe. But those with an eye for contemporary culture -- and the weekly grosses of Francis Ford Coppola's latest film in Variety -- can see that the real influence is one Mr. Zeitgeist. The Bride of Dracula, anybody...
...inherited visual cliches occupies every thinking director these days, especially when the genre is as terminal as bel canto: a collection of pretty tunes hung on the dusty skeleton of a story. Zambello's solution may be vilified in tartan-loving, canary-fancying quarters: unlike traditional stagings of Lucia, this one includes no kilts, no Scotsmen, no mountain greenery of any kind...
...literally falling apart. The centerpiece is a crumbling Ravenswood castle -- nevermore! -- that conjures the shades of doomed fictional redoubts from the Gibichungs' hall to Carfax Abbey, replete with scattered coffins, drowning pools and blood-red skies. So powerful are the designs that, probably for the first time in Lucia's history, one leaves humming the scenery...
...cultural references, particularly cinematic ones. The expressionistic sets recall Tod Browning's original 1931 film, Dracula (Bela Lugosi would have felt right at home at Ravenswood), while Martin Pakledinaz's costumes evoke David Lynch's sanguinary 1984 intergalactic flop, Dune. In the famous mad scene, Lucia's descent into insanity is symbolized by a steep staircase, down which the white-gowned murderess floats like her Nosferatu namesake, Lucy Westenra, Coppola's hot-pants vamp extraordinaire...