Latest news with #DamianoMichieletto
New York Times
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He's Bringing Rossini to Philadelphia and ‘West Side Story' to Rome
It was the morning of the dress rehearsal for Leonard Bernstein's 'West Side Story,' at the Baths of Caracalla, the ancient ruins that are the traditional summertime venue for the Rome Opera, and the show's director, Damiano Michieletto, was concerned. 'Some of the Jets have problems with precise pronunciation,' he said. After deciding to do the musical in English rather than in translation, he did not have the funds to hire a full American cast for the Jets, a gang rumbling to take the streets of New York. You could tell, he fretted. (The diction was less of a problem with the Sharks, the rival Puerto Rican gang, he said, 'because Italian, you know, that works.') That might have been his least concern. This year, Michieletto was given free rein to come up with the program for the Rome Opera's summer Caracalla Festival, which runs until Aug. 7, keeping in mind that 2025 is a Jubilee year for the Catholic Church expected to draw millions of pilgrims with varying musical tastes to Rome. In a break from past programming, he decided that the first major new production would be 'West Side Story.' A musical — gasp — was headlining one of Italy's most highbrow cultural stages and was an unusual choice in a country where musicals are considered a minor genre and often dismissed. That did not faze Michieletto, who over the past 20 years has built a reputation as a visionary, nonconformist, at times over-the-top, director whose work is in demand across Europe. In September, he will make his debut at a major American opera house with Rossini's 'Il Viaggio a Reims' at Opera Philadelphia. There he will be presenting a revival of a much-lauded version first staged in Amsterdam in 2015 and reprised several times since. For his new work at the Caracalla Festival — which this year is titled 'Between the Sacred and the Human' because it casts a wide musical net, from a staged production of Handel's oratorio 'The Resurrection' to 'West Side Story' — he opted to focus on the electric energy of a work that was directed and based on an idea by Jerome Robbins, one of the great choreographers of his generation. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Star power lifts the Royal Opera's Carmen to a thrilling new level
The gloomy, silent figure in her black dress is back, casting her disapproving shadow over her son Don José in Damiano Michieletto's production of Bizet's Carmen. When it was new last year, this show received a fairly cool reception; now revived by Dan Dooner, it has gained in strength and discipline, marshalling the hordes of chorus members and boisterous children (from the Youth Opera Company) with much firmer impact. Paolo Fantin's nervously revolving sets, based around the alternation of inside and outside a single room, create their own steamy atmosphere of heavy Andalusian sun under Alessandro Carletti's lighting, though the nightclub of Act II is pretty spartan, while the bullring of act four is non-existent, a wall of spotlights instead bearing down on us, heralding death (and the final appearance of the revengeful silent mother in black). But what everyone has come to see and hear in this revival is the star duo of Carmen and Don José. Returning from the original cast, Aigul Akhmetshina is now the go-to Carmen of our time: always casually magnetic, slightly less stiff than before, insouciantly languorous, totally aware of her devastating charm. It's not a huge voice, but wonderfully shaped: the big popular numbers are winningly projected, but so is the unearthly calm resignation of 'En vain pour éviter les responses' as she sees death in the cards she deals. New to this production, our very own tenor idol Freddie De Tommaso is a knockout as Don José with his ever-increasing intensity and sheer punch, but it must be said that not every note yet lands quite right, and not all the phrases quite join up. Although the fluttering upward scale to a gentle B flat at the end of 'La fleur que tu m'avais jetée' is beautifully managed, by no means everything is yet on this level of subtlety. The audience loves it, however, and there seems a shared bafflement that Carmen could be so thoughtlessly flighty as to abandon this commanding José for the indifferent charms of the toreador Escamillo in Łukasz Golinski's somewhat underwhelming performance. The bespectacled, ever-worthy Micaëla (Don José's earnest beloved) blossoms in Yaritza Véliz's aria, delivered with shining purity, while at the other end of the spectrum, the duo of Frasquita (Marianna Hovanisyan) and Mercédes (Jingwen Cai) are brittle and lively extroverts, doing their best to run a nightclub without much custom.
