Music Director James Levine (pictured, right) is obviously feeling well enough that he can get back to favorite pastime, i.e., making sure nobody else has a success except him.
Writes director Richard Eyre in his blog on the Met’s website:
The orchestra will be added on Monday and when that happens I will have to adjust some staging for musical reasons. Balance is all. And here we have a problem: in order to bring the action as far downstage as possible we have sited the prompter’s box in the orchestra pit. Jimmy Levine now feels that this will severely affect the balance of the woodwinds, so we’ll have to move the box to the edge of our stage, leaving a quaint bulge on our floor and requiring me to move some of the action further from the audience.
Notice: not “we tried the set out with the orchestra in the pit and there were obvious balance problems, so we’re going to have make changes,” and not “Jimmy took a look at the set blueprints in February and asked if we could change the set design slightly to move the prompter’s box out of the pit.” No: “let’s wait until the set is built and teched, and then, on a whim, make everybody change everything, because, oh, who knows, maybe something something when, as, and if woodwinds, because, after all, who’s the boss here?”
Well, the important thing, though, is that Jimmy gets what he wants, because when Jimmy doesn’t get what he wants, Jimmy isn’t happy. And video from a recent Figaro rehearsal indicates how unpleasant that can be.
