A Theatrical Bent On Opera

Director Bart Sher doesn’t read music, and he doesn’t speak Italian. So he’s directing Italian opera at the Met. “Plays are harder to stage than operas, because in opera the musical form determines so much. If I were doing a play, I would work with the actors layer by layer, taking it slowly. You know, we’d go through a passage to show how Rosina is being evasive. Then to show how she’s being a bitch. Then we’d look at how the language moves and how it picks up. We wouldn’t get up to speed for three or four rehearsals. We don’t have that kind of time here.”