Word: zambello
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...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...
...question of how to refresh opera's 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...