Gossip of the music world and the state of opera was the main topic over dinner. At one point, Mike hit a familiar refrain, saying something like, “What’s happened to opera, anyway? Such strange things going on in the staging and the requirement that men remove their shirts. When did it become a visual art and stop being an aural one?”

I was too respectful of my former professor to engage, but I chuckled inside since after dinner I would be headed to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust.” And I hadn’t a clue who was going to be singing. I was going in order to see the incredible staging by Robert Lepage, which blew me away last season when I caught it at the movies.

“Faust” was even better in person.  I missed some of the close-ups — like the evil grin of Mephistopheles and, yes, the hunky male acrobats without shirts — but the grand scope and over-arching ideas of the staging became more clear and rewarding from a seat in the mid-orchestra, instead of at my local multiplex.

For the record, though, the musical performances were good to great. Tenor Ramon Vargas conveyed well Faust’s progression — first an old man, then a young man again, eager and seeking, in love and ardor, and finally caught in hopeless desperation.  I would have liked a bit more sinister bite and general physicality from baritone Ildar Abdrazakov as Mephistopheles. As for soprano Olga Borodina as Marguerite, well, she just didn’t compare with the sumptuous Susan Graham from last year.  Throughout the night, James Conlon had that terrific orchestra and amazing chorus well in hand and kept everything moving with gusto.

Now, on to Lepage’s work.

In “Faust,” he creates a visual language that brings out the libretto’s emphasis on above and below, heaven and hell, and the purgatory of the earthly plane.  (Do you see love’s star in the vault of heaven?)

The stage is a giant grid that can become separate compartments or one giant screen for projections of live and interactive video. Think of the set for the Hollywood Squares and add little window shades on the front and back of each square.

Near the beginning, flocks of dark birds circle and swarm.  Perhaps they’re an omen but they also function to, in effect, wipe the whole slate clean.  There won’t be many circles or spirals thereafter. Everything is rigid right angles.

Soon we’re in a church and stained glass windows are projected from bottom to top.  Then we get our first glimpse of those acrobats.  First one comes out, wearing a loincloth, and climbs onto the intersection of steel posts and takes the pose of Christ on the cross — the cross, the axis mundi of spiritual salvation. But soon, four more Christs come out and, eh gad, we have five crucifixes.

For all the Christian associations of “Faust,” there’s a nice pagan emphasis on the elements of life — earth, air, fire, water — in both the libretto and this cinematic staging. (Spirits of earth and air stir your dreams.)

A greenish water that fills the screens as Mephistopheles takes Faust away in a rowboat. Figures dive into the water and, through the magic of technology, we see them become amorphous blobs floating in the liquidy projections, like sprites, perhaps, or fetus, ready for reincarnation.

Near the beginning of Part III, the set is a huge blue and white country manor and the shadow of a tree can easily be seen against it. And the tree sways in the wind. When have we ever seen (not heard) wind (air) in the theatre? Of course, we’ve all felt it when a hall is drafty and chilly as it was at the Met that night (though presumably that wasn’t part of Lepage’s doing).

Twice the male acrobats seem to turn the axis on its side and move across the surface of the set as if it were a floor.  In Part II they are soldiers marching up and down the stage, and the live video makes the green grass of the earth move buoyantly under their feet.

Then, after intermission, when the female dancers are gallivanting around in the manor house, the men return as some kind of red serpents or gargoyles.  Suspended from above, they seduce and violate the women, like in a mid-air 69-position. It’s not particularly violent, but it is certainly a forced, physical coupling of above and below.

When Faust and Marguerite finally are alone for a love duet, Lepage places them some distance apart singing straight out to the audience. Yet at the same time, he brings out pairs of dancers within each cubicle of the set and they unite in a gentle love-making dance. Behind each of them, a golden flower blooms. (What pleasure calls you into this peacock’s room?) It seems to say that in the union of sex, all barriers and grids are blown away by a radiant unfolding circle of beauty.

During Marguerite’s aria in Part III, fires flicker at all levels of the stage, and her face is broadcast huge onto the screen, itself partially in flames. (Love’s searing flame now consumes each day.)  We know she’s in love but it’s hard to tell if it’s her assumption or her immolation.

In the penultimate scene, when Faust and Mephistopheles are racing to the gates of hell on horseback, the male acrobats are suspended in profile in front of images of galloping horses.  Finally on the right side of the stage, Faust drops off his horse and falls down, down, down. And the male chorus (shirts off) is seen in red light at the bottom of the stage. Devils welcome their newest prize.

Finally, there is there is Marguerite’s journey up to the blue clouds of heaven.  No great technological magic here, only another ladder, which has been a reoccurring image throughout the night.  And rather than resorting to a dancer taking her place, the star soprano herself (with a tether on her back) climbs some 40 or 50 feet into the fly space above the Met’s enormous stage. Angels sing to welcome her.

As much as I’ve loved that slow and lush music and its popular 1992 recording by Dawn Upshaw, I don’t remember ever checking out the words, which are sung in Polish. But supertitles provided translations during the performance of “Lipsynch,” seen on Sunday October 11 in the Harvey Theater as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.   And the poetry provides a potent prelude to what ensues:

My son, my chosen and beloved

Share your wounds with your mother

Because, dear son, I have always carried you in my heart.

While there’s other vocal music sprinkled throughout the nine-hour show, only one character does, almost, lipsynch.  That’s Sarah who we see doing some light housework, smoking a cigarette and mouthing along to Burt Bacharach’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” as it plays on the radio.

Sarah’s a sometime prostitute and also the housekeeper for an elderly, wheelchair-bound speech therapist, who was a mentor and mother figure to Ada, who’s an opera singer and soloist in the Gorecki and who adopts Jeremy, who’s own mother dies on an airplane in the opening scene, while he was just an infant.  After a youthful stint leading a satanic rock band, Jeremy becomes a filmmaker, and writes a script based on what he knows about his birth mother. He researched her heritage in Nicaragua, but didn’t learn the truth about how she got to Germany only to die in a plane headed to Canada until the audience also finds out, at the play’s end.

These relationships, and many others besides, actually make plenty of sense and become quite affecting as they are revealed throughout the daylong journey.

Spending so much time in the theater — the nine hours includes four intermissions plus a 45-minute dinner break — fostered a sense of community in the audience.  I shared supper with a lively bunch sitting near by, including an acting student in her early 20s who’d only been in the city for two weeks.

Manhattanites probably still complain about having to travel all the way out to Brooklyn in order to take in BAM’s unique offerings. But I rose early and took Amtrak down from Albany to see “Lipsynch.”  Not only did I buy a train ticket, I bought my seat for the show, too. That’s not something I’m accustomed to doing. One of the few fringe benefits of being a perpetually struggling freelance writer is free tickets.  BAM’s publicity office pleaded limited availability of press tickets, but were good enough to comp me for Philip Glass’ latest opera “Kepler,” which I’ll return for in November.  (That same week I’ll also catch Lepage’s staging of Berlioz “Damnation of Faust” at The Met.)

I had little doubt that Lepage would be worth the time, effort and money.  My familiarity with him grew out of my relationship to BAM.

After beginning my arts career with a season-long internship working for Philip Bither in the Next  Wave office, I was a loyal subscriber for all of my 13 years living in the city before moving upstate in 2000. I focused my ticket buying on the music and dance offerings but generally trusted Joe Melillo and Harvey Lichenstein’s tastes. And so I took a chance on Lepage’s “Seven Streams of the River Ota” in 1996.  Also an eight- to nine-hour immersion, “Ota” weaved together another bundle of stories involving nothing less than the Holocaust, Hiroshima and AIDS.  I find it difficult to even put all three of those tragedies into one sentence, but Lepage’s show was masterful and transcendent, very human and often hilarious.  It’s not an exaggeration to say it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.

“Lipsynch” doesn’t quiet raise to that level, but it doesn’t shoot as high either. Instead of placing characters in epic catastrophes, they face health issues like schizophrenia and brain tumors, or are trapped in sex slavery and incest. Plus there’s just plenty of good old fashioned family alienation.

Lepage’s trademarks as a director are in the use of audio and visual technology and the reliance on large sets made of multi-panel units.  In “Lipsynch” there’s plenty of fancy live video and audio technology new and old, including cassettes and open reel tape decks.   A large crew wheels in and out all manner of complicated but multi-functional sets.

But in a departure from Lepage’s visual focus, “Lipsyche” is, above all, about sounds and voices.  The whole idea for the piece, which Lepage wrote in collaboration with the actors of his Toronto-based company known as ExMachina, came to him while riding in an airplane. An operatic soprano was warming up in first class at the same time a baby was crying in coach.  Both of those show up in the first scene and are followed by:

• a surgeon illustrating the parts of a brain that affect speech
• voice lessons and the unexpected intimacy they often bring about between teacher and student
• speech therapy
• overdubbing spoken dialogue for a film
• lip-reading
• multi-track recording of vocal music with no texts (one track sounded like a percussion line, two and three tracks together like Steve Reich, and the final four-track like a kind of Medieval take on Meredith Monk)
• choir practice
• jazz scatting
• electronic transformation of a female voice into the male register (a la Laurie Anderson)
• the emotional effect of remembering a deceased parent’s voice
• multiple overlapping conversations in a crowded restaurant
• voices raised in an argument (though the actors are unseen)
• the pervasive, wallpaper characteristics of radio news, as it drones on and on
• poetry recitation
• the necessity of changing one’s voice to change one’s identity.
• recording of audio books
• actors creating a laugh track
• the uncanny ability to identify a person’s age, body type and province by listening to a voice
• the voices heard in one’s head, sometimes as a symptom of mental illness.
• voice mail
• and, of course, cell phones with and without hands free devices.

Many of these drive the plot, while the presence of certain things, especially the brain surgery, seemed a little obvious.

There were only nine actors in the show and each played multiple parts. At least half of “Lipsynch” was performed in languages other than English, including French, Spanish, German and Italian.  Frequently the supertitles dropped away with little effect, since the gist of things was clear enough.  Who needs to know every invective hurled during an argument.

Also present was another trademark of Lepage’s own creations (as opposed to his increasing work in opera) and it’s something that I relish:  silence.  What a rarity in the theater!  Several pivotal scenes were conducted with no dialogue, just some random street noise or the sound of news commentators on talk radio.

In a brilliant and luxurious device, one scene of at least 10 minutes in length was performed twice, back to back.  It takes place inside a small Toronto bookstore on a snowy evening.  First, we watch from the street, looking in through the dirty windows at Michelle, a middle aged woman who’s wrestled with mental illness.  She glimpses out on the chilly sidewalk a priest dressed in vestments and a little girl in play clothes. It’s obvious that they exist only in her mind. All we hear are traffic noises.  But then time jumps backward and we’re inside the warmth of the shop and listen as Michelle patiently assists the browsers and shows an impressive knowledge of literature and poetry.  In the scene’s final action, she hands a large book to a young man who departs without paying.  On first viewing, it seems she’s carelessly giving away the stock. But on second encounter, we hear that it’s a loan to a struggling student burdened with homework.

There were many other wonderful moments in “Lipsych,” lots of funny lines and a wrenching denouement that most of us figured out by the time the last intermission rolled around.

After all those voices, disembodied and incarnate, and all that modern technology, the marathon ends as it began with some of the Gorecki symphony. The singer, Rebecca Blankenship who played Ada, appears much as she did at the beginning. But now, she’s not just a singer, but she’s one more voice that’s not yet been included in the play — that of the earth itself.

Where has he gone

My dearest son?

Perhaps during the uprising

The cruel enemy killed him…

He lies in his grave

and I know not where

Though I keep asking people

Everywhere.

It’s the first rehearsal for act one, scene one of “Sleeping Beauty,” and Basil Twist is telling the frogs how high to hop (and when to “strike,” or leave the stage) and the winged fairies how to glide through the air with grace. A crew of 12 young puppeteers does its best to make the creatures respond.

Twist and his company have come to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., for two weeks of work to stage Ottorino Respighi’s 80-minute, three-act puppet opera “La bella dormente nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty in the Woods).”

By late May, when the production premieres in Charleston, S.C., at the Spoleto Festival USA, the stage will be filled with a seemingly effortless beauty. But building a world of fantasy requires dealing with numerous hard realities.

For the preview at MASS MoCA, the piece will still be a work-very-much-in-progress. Not all of the puppets are built yet, let alone costumed. Large chunks of Styrofoam suspended on strings have been filling in as substitutes. And the music will come from a recording. Eventually, the Gotham Chamber Opera will become part of the production, adding seven vocalists, a chorus of 20 and a 34-piece orchestra.

With a budget of nearly half a million dollars, “Sleeping Beauty” is the most ambitious undertaking thus far in the rapid rise of Basil Twist. Five years ago, at age 30, Twist created an underwater abstract treatment – “puppet show” seems hardly the right description – to Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique.” It was produced on a budget of $40,000 for a four-week run at Here, a small performance space in New York City’s SoHo district. The piece caused a sensation and played for 18 months. After a national tour, it returned to New York last year for an off-Broadway run of six months.

“Since I did that, the music world opened up to me,” says Twist. “People were excited about how I treated the music.” Since then it’s been one high-profile production after another for Twist, all involving puppets.

His “Petroushka” premiered at Lincoln Center in 2001 and also played at Jacob’s Pillow, as well as five other venues across the country. It caught the attention of conductor Neil Goran, director of the 4-year-old Gotham Chamber Opera.

“I thought it was one of the greatest evenings I’ve ever had in the theater,” says Goran. “It was unbelievably inventive in every possible way, one unexpected moment of genius after another.”

The biography of Basil Twist III says that he’s a third-generation puppeteer. But that implies something a little grander than reality.

“There’s many puppeteers who belong to dynasties. I don’t come from that kind of lineage,” says Twist, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

His mom was a part-time puppeteer who mostly entertained children “very kind of `Sesame Street’-style,” says Twist while his grandfather was a professional musician. “Puppets were a hobby of his and were part of his act sometimes,” Twist says.

Even if Twist doesn’t have the finest of puppetry pedigrees, the art form is certainly in his blood. His affinity for it showed up early on.

“I made all these `Star Wars’ puppets,” he says with a bit of hesitation and a shy toothy grin. Recalling his childhood in the 1970s, Twist says, “I made R2D2 out of L’eggs pantyhose containers.”

Twist arrived in New York City in the late 1980s but soon departed for France, where he spent three years at the International Institute of Puppetry in the rural town of Charleville.

“Charleville ends up being like North Adams,” says Twist, quietly laughing again as he sits in the cafe at MASS MoCA. “(It’s) out in the middle of nowhere, but there is this incredible thing happening there … this mecca for puppetry. People come from all over the world.”

The school’s broad curriculum gave Twist a fluency in the range of international puppetry styles and techniques. Today, when he mixes traditions within one piece, such as putting string puppets and hand puppets on stage at the same time, he’s called avant-garde. But Twist thinks of himself as something of a traditionalist.

“I’m real old-fashioned in that I like the puppeteer to be hidden,” he says. “When I was in France, and in most contemporary puppetry these days, like say `Avenue Q’ (a puppet musical that’s been playing on Broadway for 18 months) the puppeteer is visible on stage. It’s almost the definition of a modern puppet performance. I got so sick of that.”

Although Twist is clearly ready for the challenges of major productions, he still has the most fun making a new puppet in a few hours for an impromptu show. Most often over the years such productions have been in the company of New York City drag queens.

“There are not many puppeteers hanging out in that world,” says Twist, who has performed at many of Manhattan’s gay nightclubs as well as at the famous drag festival Wigstock. He even has immortalized as a puppet the Lady Bunny, Wigstock’s founder and host.

“We would do duets. The real Bunny and the puppet Bunny … the stupidest stuff, but when a puppet does it, people just die,” says Twist.

Becoming an opera director allows for less spontaneity.

“I used to do everything myself,” says Twist, “but once a show gets so big, I can’t possibly build everything myself. It is a struggle for me to let go and have others do the work.”

With “Sleeping Beauty,” Twist is getting plenty of practice at delegating.

“He’s very easy and very silly,” says Jessica Scott, a puppeteer in the current production. She also assists Twist at his studio in Manhattan’s West Village, where work on the current production will continue after the MASS MoCA residency.

“Something that characterizes Basil (is) the way he gets you to commit,” says Scott. “He’s consciously cultivated a community.”

Twist has been building his team ever since “Symphony Fantastique.” As an administrator at Here, Barbara Busackino commissioned that piece and has produced each of his subsequent projects.

“He is extremely controlling, extremely decisive, and he is wonderful because of that,” says Busackino. “If he says there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs, there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs in the end. … You can get a team behind that and realize it. Of course there’s tons of experimentation and failures along the way.”

It’s not just other puppeteers who are getting behind Twist’s vision. Prestigious institutions also continue to seek him out. Lincoln Center has recently come on board for “Sleeping Beauty” and will present the production at its annual summer festival this year.

In the meantime, Twist is keeping busy creating more stage magic.

“I’m into spiders. That’s part of what sold me on this show,” he says. “I saw spiders (in the story) and was like, `Great!’”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, February 13, 2005.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

Zambello is an opera director. In other words, she’s fearless.

Dealing with powerful impresarios, delicate singers and bossy conductors comes with the territory. But Zambello puts it simply, saying, “I’m a storyteller.”

Sometimes her challenge isn’t who she’s working with but what she’s given to dramatize.  Take her latest piece, Shostakovich’s rarely performed 1928 opera “The Nose,” which opens at Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson on Friday.

In the opera, a man’s proboscis is accidentally cut off at the barbershop. It runs out the door and takes on a grand new life of its own. And a cast of 27 principals and 24 chorus members sing about it in Russian for about two hours.

“It’s a rather bizarre, quirky, zany wonderful story,” says Zambello. “The nose looks like a big nose a 5-foot nose. And as he grows in self-importance, he grows from being a regular-size nose to a supernose.”

If anyone is up to the task of the supernose, it’s Francesca Zambello.

“She’s at the top of her form and the top of her field,” says Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, who will conduct the American Symphony Orchestra in “The Nose.”

Botstein engaged Zambello for the production about a year ago, which is relatively short lead time in the world of opera, especially with a director as in demand as Zambello, who regularly works in the major opera houses of Europe, including the Paris Opera and London’s Covent Garden.

Zambello’s renown has come, at least in part, for her faithfulness to operatic tradition. This stands in sharp contrast to directors like Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars, who find fame by making themselves and their vision such an obvious, sometimes intrusive, part of what’s on stage.

“I’m a populist,” says Zambello when asked to describe her style, during a recent discussion between rehearsals at Bard. “I’m interested in getting opera out there to the widest number of people through means that make it as accessible as possible.”

Staging a piece in the 3,800-seat Met certainly means reaching audiences. But Zambello also points to a production early this year of “La Boheme” at the 5,000-seat Royal Albert Hall in London. “Seventy-five thousand people saw that,” she says.

Zambello approached “The Nose” as she does every opera – with months of historical research, long discussions with the production team and a gut instinct about what works on stage and can speak to contemporary audiences. “It’s a satire from the 1920s, based on (the short story) by Gogol, which was written in the 1830s,” she says. “It’s about class climbing, and that’s something that’s endemic all the time. (It’s also) about everyman versus bureaucracy, and anybody could relate to that.”

Composed when Shostakovich was 21 years old, the music has an optimism that became increasingly rare in his music, as he struggled to be an artist under Soviet rule. “It shows brilliant virtuosity and tremendous influence of Stravinsky,” Botstein says of the score. Zambello sees in the opera’s quick pacing Shostakovich’s interest in film. “It moves forward in real time, almost a cinematic time,” she says.

Along with a multinational cast that includes six Russians, Bard’s “Nose” team features as set designer the Latin American, New York City-based architect Rafael Vinoly. Follows in the footsteps of Frank Ghery, who designed the Fisher Center as well as the sets for last year’s production of Janacek’s opera “Osud,” Vinoly is planning a new science building for the Bard campus and in the meantime takes a stab at opera.

Says Zambello, “When you collaborate with someone from outside the theatrical realm … it’s always stimulating intellectual dialogue, and eventually you have to find a way to get it on the stage, and we’re getting there.”

After recent summers spent in France, Austria, Japan and Seattle, Zambello is enjoying the summer at Bard since she has a home less than an hour away in Gardner, near New Paltz.

“It’s wonderful to be able to work and sleep in your own bed. It boils down to something so simple,” she says. Zambello shares her country home and a Manhattan apartment with her companion of 15 years, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Manuela Hoelterhoff, and their three beagles.

Hoelterhoff has written on opera and music for the Wall Street Journal and has an upcoming book on Hitler and Wagner. Recently she was named to a new post overseeing cultural reporting for Bloomberg Media. The new job will make it even harder for Hoelterhoff to travel with Zambello, who says, “It’s not good to have your partner with you when there’s so much work.”

The couple did collaborate on one opera, “Modern Painters,” based on the life of John Ruskin. Zambello’s production premiered at the Sante Fe Opera in 1995. The libretto was by Hoelterhoff and music by David Lang. “I’m sure we’ll end up collaborating on something else,” says Zambello.  “We both have our thoughts on each other’s work. It’s great to have artistic discussions with her. She’s a keen thinker.”

As a leading American figure in opera, Zambello is often approached by composers eager to write for the stage. “I try to be as helpful, positive and nurturing as possible, because that’s a very isolated world,” she says.

Though it’s not often Zambello does direct a new piece, her track record with them is good. An operatic take on the classic French book “The Little Prince” premiered last year at the Houston Grand Opera with music by the Academy Award-winning composer Rachel Portman (“The Piano”). Six other companies have since lined up to remount the piece, including the New York City Opera.

Also in the 2005-06 season, the Metropolitan Opera will present Zambello’s staging of the premiere of Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,” based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser. It’s her third collaboration with the composer, who lives near Rhinebeck. “It’s truly an upstate (New York) opera. Most of it takes place in the Adirondacks,” Zambello says. Picker admires Zambello’s abilities as a director, having seen her in operation both in and out of the opera house.

“She’s a real director,” he says. “You go to her house and two people are sitting near each other and she tells them to talk to each other or look out the window. She’s always directing. … I love going out to eat with her. You get good service.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, July 25, 2004.

Also appears in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.