Seattle director is riding high in NYC from Broadway to the Met

The past two years have been very, very good to Bartlett Sher.

And not just in Seattle, where Intiman Theatre, of which he is artistic director, received a Tony Award for best regional theater in June. But in New York, where he scored two huge successes on Broadway and this month made his debut as a director at the Metropolitan Opera.

The New York press has been in a worshipping mood, throwing glowing reviews and interviews at Sher with seeming abandon. With huge advance coverage, including David Letterman on his "Late Show," the arrival of Sher's "The Barber of Seville" at the Metropolitan would have been hard to miss. His invitation to direct at the largest American opera company came as a result of his inaugural New York appearances: as director of Adam Guettel's musical "The Light in the Piazza," created primarily at Intiman, and of Clifford Odets' 1935 drama "Awake and Sing!," which New York Times drama critic Charles Isherwood in June called "the greatest act of theatrical reclamation that took place on Broadway this year." Both productions were treated generously by the Tonys.

Over lunch, Frank Rich, former chief drama critic for The New York Times and now a columnist, suggested to Peter Gelb, the Met's new general manager, that he consider hiring Sher as a director. Hoping to transform the august company into something more theatrically vibrant, Gelb did just that. Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" would be the first new production of his regime.

He told the P-I in an interview this spring: "Opera needs to draw upon great directors from the spoken theater or any other art form. The important thing is that they possess great theatrical imagination ... honest imagination, not contrived imagination. What is wonderful in looking outside normal opera circles for directors is that they are less likely to rely on routine and past experience and more likely to be creative and demanding on themselves."

Enter the smart, articulate, even eloquent, theatrically savvy, impassioned Sher, whom Andre Bishop described in an interview with Opera News as turbulent as "the Atlantic in November." Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, which produced "The Light in the Piazza" and "Awake and Sing!" should know.

Sher may be confident and poised, but he's no fool. He knew the dangers of staging a revered piece of the opera canon in a place that would guarantee maximum exposure and risk. His experience in the lyric theater was limited: Marvin David Levy's "Mourning Becomes Electra" at Seattle Opera three years ago and New York City Opera the following year. He would have three weeks of rehearsal to mount the show, a standard time in opera, a short time in theater.

"Seattle Opera taught me how to handle the various forces unique to opera," he said from New York. "Without that, the Met would have chewed me up and spit me out. The Met is not like anywhere else: With 32 productions a year, it is a giant operation, a caldron of creativity."

By asking him to stage Rossini's ebullient masterpiece, Sher said, Gelb was beginning to fulfill his mandate to make the company more vibrant. "Peter is very low-key but a very clear person. He wanted me to explore my own imagination. I had to engage the tradition of the opera and the audience's memory of it, but I also wanted something that was theatrically fresh."

Sher began by doing a number of things: securing colleagues he knew and trusted from "The Light in the Piazza" and "Awake and Sing!"; researching "Barber" by looking at videos and hearing recordings; reading Beaumarchais' play on which the opera is based; sitting in the vast reaches of the Met, with some 4,000 seats, and considering its space. Sher doesn't read music, so score-reading had its limitations.

The performance that had the most impact on Sher, via video, was from La Scala in 1972, staged by that French genius of stagecraft, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and conducted by Claudio Abbado. "It was that production that made me realize what a great masterpiece the opera is," he said. His recording of choice is the one with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi from the 1950s.

A number of decisions were made. The 18th-century setting would remain, but its context made more intimate and fluid. Among the most noted innovations in the production, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the audience and the stage, was a ramp, what Sher calls a "passerelle," over the pit. It was designed especially to accommodate all those extended finales that Rossini wrote. The sets -- including a series of yellow doors randomly arranged and potted orange trees, to symbolize Seville -- were modular and always moving. The character of Figaro, the "barber," was reconsidered to make him more compelling as a personality. The time between recitative and aria was shortened to streamline the action.

Of interest to Sher, not surprisingly, was a reexamination of the dramatic unpinnings of the opera, particularly its "revolutionary spirit" derived from Beaumarchais' play. "I wanted to pull that out. What Rossini visualized was not just another platform for buffo antics." He told Martin Bernheimer, New York correspondent for the Financial Times, that "any good comedy must have some teeth under the funny surface."

"I also wanted to open up some cuts to make sure the story was developing and moving along. I didn't want the audience just to wait for someone to sing something familiar but to feel the connection between the music and the text."

Sher was lucky. He had some very good singers to do his directorial bidding such as Juan Diego Florez as Count Almaviva and Peter Mattei as Figaro.

The New York Times gave Sher a good review; Bernheimer's was more mixed. However, both took him seriously even when in disagreement with his ideas. Although Sher is being discreet, his path to more opera is already being laid: "Peter and I have discussed future projects, and Speight (Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera) and I are talking."

What would interest him? "I would love to do 'Falstaff.' The ending is wonderful. Also, 'Marriage of Figaro,' but not 'Don Giovanni,' which is so endless. That's just a beginning off the top of my head -- great Verdi and Mozart."

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