“Boys” meets world
UPDATE: A press release has just gone out announcing “The Metropolitan Opera and the English National Opera (ENO) will co-produce a world premiere production of composer Nico Muhly’s first opera.
With a libretto by Craig Lucas, [Uhhhhh - LC] the opera is a fictionalized story based on a true incident in which a teenager attempts to arrange his own murder via the internet. The new production, directed by Bartlett Sher [Double uhhhhh, is it 1988 again and nobody told me? - LC], will debut at the ENO’s London Coliseum in June 2011 and be presented at the Met during its 2013-14 season. The creative team includes Sher’s longtime collaborators set designer Michael Yeargan and costume designer Catherine Zuber; lighting designer Donald Holder; and the acclaimed London-based video designers Fifty Nine Productions.
The release also confirms the previously whispered rumor that Lucas has engaged as his publicist the late illusionist Doug Henning:
Librettist Craig Lucas said, “To be able to share the stage with anything as numinous and magical as Nico’s music is a true gift of the journey.”
EARLIER: La Cieca hears that any moment now the Metropolitan Opera will announce that the opera they commissioned from Nico Muhly, Two Boys, is on the schedule for the 2013-2014 season.
Remember that the Met was going to do that new opera about Daedalus next season. These new commissions have a way of disappearing long before the premieres. (Anyone have the inside on what happened there?)
I think San Francisco’s Bobby McFerrin commission, an opera about Gethsemane, disappeared over a decade ago, never to be heard about again.
Well, Anthony Minghella was writing the libretto for that, wasn’t he?
There’s now an AP article on the Muhly commission out there on Google. It seems a bit “newsier” to me than Daniel Wakin’s coverage in the New York Times or the Broadway World article (the first two I saw).
It addresses a few key points of interest about TWO BOYS as well as the Golijov commission, set for 2014-2015 with Argentine-Canadian Alberto Manguel replacing Minghella as librettist. The subject matter is given as the “relationship between science and religion,” so perhaps the idea of a opera based on Daedalus/Greek myths has gone away.
The article also discusses the Met/Lincoln Center Project’s involvement in Michael Torke’s SENNA, libretto by Michael Korie, who did GREY GARDENS and the GRAPES OF WRATH opera.
This is a done deal. ENO already rejected other possibilities.
As in all business, when the ‘bright sparks’ see the future plans they touted for business… ain’t gonna work’….they quicly decide to jump ship and try to place the blame elsewhere. This of course is their parting gift to an organization. The mea culpa that it was ‘outside my control’ or ‘made over their head’. Wait for a few years and watch.
In Europe they’re only spending public money, after all. I love the way opera houses spend a fortune on poster advertising in London. A complete waste of money, since only a tiny proportion of people who see the posters in the Tube will ever go near an opera house. But they have to show that they are ‘reaching out to a new audience zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. The best way to do that is through PR and probably online — not through pissing away hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on advertising.
Covent Garden should bring back Leo Maggs! Up until about 1988, Covent Garden had ONE stock design of poster -only the black and white photo of the production and the typewritten details changed. You immediate knew whose poster you were looking and it cost a minute fraction of the price. The money spent on the Artists of the World posters – or whatever they are – is a disgrace…
That’s an interesting question. Do the Met ads on the side of New York buses pay for themselves? Generic publicity has its benefits but would they get more for their money advertising to specific target audiences, e.g., cultural and educational organizations, Met ads on Playbill, etc.? I’m just wondering.
It seems to me that the bus ads are sponsored by a special gift from Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman, so they don’t come out of the Met’s general advertising budget. The philosophy of this kind of more generalized advertising (and I’m not saying I necessarily buy into the concept) is to raise the profile of the Met in the New York community, i.e., to put across the notion that something very special is happening at the opera house, something that is a vital part of the arts life of the city. There is a certain amount of intellectual “snobbery” in New York City, a sense that certain artistic events, plays, books and so forth are necessary viewing for the elite. So the purpose of the bus ads I think is more to create an atmosphere of “I feel like an idiot that I missed this, so I really need to get in and buy tickets early for the next big Met event.”
I personally would’ve commissioned an opera from Richard Wagner, but seeing as he’s still dead, Nico Muhly can have it. I’ll listen to it, and then decide.
I do hope he extricates the libretto from any ridiculous and outlandish plot elements, though. That’s just not something we’re used to seeing in opera.
This whole enterprise makes one cherish even more such a treasure as Strauss’ ARIADNE and the Met production in particular.