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.
Francesco Giambrone, the general manager of the Rome opera said at a presentation of the festival program last month that Michieletto had been given “carte blanche” and had curated a billing that includes new opera productions by three other directors, in addition to his own “West Side Story.”
Michieletto’s “West Side Story” is just one of five new productions he has directed this year, including the world premiere at La Scala in April of “The Name of the Rose” by the Italian composer Francesco Filidei and based on the book by Umberto Eco. It got rave reviews. “We were very lucky, because it could have been a disaster,” which is how it is with new operas, Michieletto said: They are risky and costly, yet absolutely fundamental to the lifeblood of the art form.
Without new works, “this system,” he said of the world of opera, “is not going to be forever and ever. So face the crisis. Choose the crisis.”
Michieletto has not shied away from choosing the crisis, or controversy, which has dogged him throughout his career.
There has been “lots” of controversy, he laughed.
There was the 2010 “Madama Butterfly” that touched on themes of sex tourism. There was also the 2013 “Un Ballo in Maschera” set amid a modern electoral campaign that spurred some opera purists at La Scala in Milan to shower the stage with pamphlets denouncing the “offense to tradition and good taste.”
And — perhaps most notoriously — there was a 2015 “Guillaume Tell” at the Royal Opera House in London, in which a scene suggesting a gang rape literally halted the show.
“I think everybody was a little bit surprised by the overreaction, which stopped the orchestra for a few seconds because it was so loud,” he said of the people involved in the production when audience booing filled the hall. He still defends his directing choice, saying that the violence of that scene helped the audience better understand the high stakes of the drama. “It’s not like a provocation because I don’t know what to do, so let’s provoke,” he said. “I never do that.” Instead, he often develops back stories for his characters (say, a pregnant daughter in “Gianni Schicchi”), to “give a reason for why they are singing,” he said.
His staging of “Il Viaggio a Reims,” for Opera Philadelphia in September, was unlikely to ruffle feathers, he said — though there is a scene featuring three topless ballerinas. He would change that, he said, if asked. “I’m really flexible on that. What is important is the concept,” he added.
Rather than transposing Rossini’s opera about a group making a pilgrimage to Reims, France, for the coronation of Charles X to the modern era on a cruise ship or in an airport (obvious, but uninventive solutions, he said), Michieletto has set the work in a museum. The characters are transformed into art world denizens, from curators to restorers and even figures from famous artworks. “Once I found the key to open the door,” he said, “then it really went very, very fast.”
“Reims” is promoted by the Philadelphia Opera as Michieletto’s “long-awaited American debut” but that’s technically not true. About 20 years ago, he was drafted to direct a small work by Cimarosa for a graduating class at the Yale School of Music. He believes that the person they had originally wanted to hire had fallen through, “so I was like the second choice,” he laughed. But he’d been happy to do it.
In the United States, he had also been tapped to direct a co-production with the Paris Opera of Camille Saint-Saëns “Samson et Dalila” that was set to travel to the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2018. However, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, backed out after seeing it. “‘I’m not sure this is the right production for the Met,’” Michieletto recalled Gelb saying. (Gelb did not respond to a request to comment.)
Representatives from Music Theatre International, the licensing company that manages the rights to the show, were also not so thrilled when Michieletto proposed a different finale for his “West Side Story,” which he has set in a swimming pool. He had envisioned the show ending in a “kind of flashback” to the scene in which Tony and Maria, the star-crossed lovers, first see each other and fall in love. “They didn’t want a happy ending,” Michieletto said, and told him to stick to the original.
He complied, but came up with a “poetic and simple” rearrangement of the set that sends a message about what could happen in a world where violence had been overcome by the power of love. “I could have understood if they objected to it being set in a swimming pool,” he said, but he was stumped by their rejection of his alternative finale.
“But it’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine.”
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
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