Word: ravenswood
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead, set designer John Conklin evokes a gray, gloomy, decaying world (much like present-day Britain, in fact) that is 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...
...disparate as San Francisco and Bayreuth, in both cases in Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. But Zambello goes further in her use of pop 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...