What a concept, or La Cieca should say what a concept! This is Regie at its finest and most boldly satirical, genius that makes Graham Vick look like two-day-old steak frites. For this production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the director (unnamed, alas in the YouTube clip below) utilizes the cinematic convention of the flash-forward in a postmodern epoch-bending variation. What if, this staging asks, Manon were to survive her various torments and travails? What would her life be like at, say, age 60? And what if, instead of hanging around mosquito-ridden Louisiana, she invested in a condo in Miami Beach (circa 1975)? 

Well, now we know.