EDGE Interview: Innovative Director James Darrah Puts Mozart in the 'Twilight Zone' with BLO's 'Mitridate'

EDGE: Are you allowed, as the director, to make significant changes?

James Darrah: The equivalent would be a really great novel that a film director is inspired by. He writes a screenplay and gets, if it's somebody alive, that person to sign off on it. It's an adaptation of a directorial vision of something that is existing. Opera was the dominant art form of the world for centuries. We have a very different understanding of what holds our attention now, of what sounds good. I'm very seldom interested in historical performance. Doing it just because it's old and Mozart doesn't interest me. I always try to find why does this piece still exist? Why is it worth us, a modern audience, seeing it? It can't just be because it's opera and elite and you should want to see it because it's cultural. When I really looked at this opera I saw a lot of interplay of gender and power. Can women hold power? Do women have the ability to make their own choices about who they love? What does it mean to be a king? What we're doing is finding parallels to what the original intent was, story wise, without changing the of energy of the music. The music tells us what we need to know. With this score, Mozart's music moves. It has life to it.

I feel like it's the director's job to create an entire world, setting the feeling and mood, thinking about what that world is. What are the rules of this world? What do you want to say to the audience that is poetic, or artful, or illuminates something in our own lives, whether we know it or not? I tell my students opera is not domestic. It doesn't do domestic things well. When you're talking about inner emotions, obsession, turmoil, and how that can lead to violence, lust, power and desire and how that all crumbles, then it starts to work for me. It's a massive art form that contains our best dreams and our worst nightmares.

EDGE: That's a lot of work for two performances. Why are so many opera productions such short runs?

James Darrah: It's the nature of a lot of opera right now because it's in a nonprofit sphere with funding that is hard. A lot of people think they know what it is, or they've never been, or they just don't care about it. It's an art form in which a human being has spent a ton of time in school and in life with teachers to learn how to power the human voice over 60 instruments below them, unamplified. It is this kind of feat of nature that the human being and the human voice can do. But just because it can be done isn't enough. It needs to be an artistic statement and I think a good artistic statement can happen in one performance or 30. Opera isn't really poised to commercialize itself in the same way that a Broadway theater piece can. And very seldom do you have a Broadway show that has a 65-person orchestra and unamplified.

It's a different world, and it is a lot of work, but the ephemerality of it is really intriguing. You make this thing that is all these forces that come together once to make this work of art, and then it all goes away. Everyone goes their separate way. There's something in that I've come to embrace about it. The value of a piece of art is not determined by its longevity. It's determined by what the mood and experience is when you do it.

EDGE: But some would say that it's really as simple as putting butts in seats.

James Darrah: I'm so sick of that narrative. Can people just stop talking about getting new audiences and just go do it? We all have phones. Make a cool film that is an opera thing. Go commission an awesome rock star or pop star to do something that isn't emulating grand opera. Hire a filmmaker to make something that is exploring that world and don't say that there's rules about it. Let them do it themselves, hire a visual artist and let them do what they want in the opera sphere. I get myself in trouble sometimes because I'm saying all that, but I do see the way in which it works. I've done things that have those currents to them, people are ready to go there, and they're ready to engage with it if they're invited to it.

EDGE: But for many people, opera is still a hard no.

James Darrah: I really reject the idea that you either like opera or you don't. It's hundreds of years old and you hate all of it. Really? I guarantee you a lot of opera audiences have not heard "Mitridate." And they've not seen a production of it that interprets it. Here's this thing that's hundreds of years old that a brilliant, genius teenager wrote. It has incredible music and a D-minus plot. It's in public domain, so I get to do whatever the hell I want as an artist, but not violate the core of what Mozart wrote musically. I'm not a revisionist in the sense that I think let's detonate the whole thing. I'm thinking how do I illuminate this for people now, and not present it like I'm doing a TED talk about the history of Mozart?

EDGE: Your passion for opera is infectious. What drew you to it?

James Darrah: When you hear a singer, especially up close, sing that way, it hits your bones and your brain, and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe human beings can do this. And I was really into mythology, and a lot of early operas like the mythological and messy, bloody, sexual and queer. There's a lot of cool aspects of it and I'm most interested in doing work that highlights some of that. Work that shows that you can make space for all different types of artists. I like inviting.

EDGE: Talk about the vocal challenges of this piece.

James Darrah: There's a lot of notes. It's hard, a lot of it is fast and there are some big arias that are pretty expansive and also extreme. The lead tenor role is a very hard thing to sing in terms of how it was written musically. Lawrence Brownlee, the tenor, is one of the best singers working in the country and internationally. He wanted to do the piece because he can sing the role. It's hard to find somebody willing to take on what can be a punishing role. It's not conducive to a singer that is not an exceptional musician ready to tackle it. It has a level of difficulty, a level of virtuosity, and a kind of showmanship and bravura that demands a certain type of singer.

EDGE: Did Boston Lyric Opera come to you to do this?

James Darrah: Larry Brownlee suggested it to the BLO when they were talking to him about what he might want to do. When he said he wanted to do this, I said, "I know that piece. It's great. I would love to work on it, direct it and think about how to put it together for a current audience, a current world."

EDGE: So how do you make it current for a new or younger audience?

James Darrah: Some of it is to look at what's popular in pop culture. Opera traditionally has thought pop culture isn't worth it. I say let's bring that world in. Let's look at what's in the cultural zeitgeist. I tell my designers to think about things people don't think of in opera. I very seldom feel like I'm making opera to appease an opera lover.

Younger generations don't really care about the traditions of opera. They want to see something that looks cool, feels cool, tells them a story, moves them. And I'm not afraid of enigmatic question marks. Opera has this tendency at times to have everybody want everything explained to them. It's the equivalent of people going into a museum and not looking at the art but reading the thing about the art on the wall so they know what to think about it. It makes me laugh.

EDGE: How did you reimagine "Mitirdate?"

James Darrah: The piece has this weird internal turmoil of all this gossip and all these people. I've been re-watching the 1960s "Twilight Zone" series and I thought this opera feels like a Twilight Zone episode. We should just make it one and it should be in a 60s ballroom where they can't leave, like (Sartre's) "No Exit." They don't know why they're there, and they're all going mad. And it turns out they're all just in this dark, black void where this hedonistic desire for power is replicated over and over and over. All these weird things happen in the ballroom. You see the shadows of other people dancing, but you don't know where they are. They can't leave and the floor starts cracking open. These things are not things that are in Mozart's libretto but there's music to support it. It's an interpretation that comes from my own love of surrealism and art forms that embrace films that might be experimental or provocative.

EDGE: What do you hope the audience is going to experience?

James Darrah: I want it to feel like you went to Truman Capote's Black and White Ball and you're stuck there forever. Everyone's in these gorgeous 60s gowns and you can never leave. It's very Camelot American dynasty feeling, but everything starts to unravel and go wrong. The lights move in weird ways and the walls kind of start moving. The physical space is very simple but it starts to manipulate the psychology of the characters. It's a fever dream of a piece. Everyone's singing to us for two hours at the top of their lungs, in Italian. We've left reality behind.

The Boston Lyric Opera's production of Mozart's "Mitridate, re di Ponto" takes plac at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre Friday, September 13, 2024 at 7:30PM and Sunday, September 15, 2024 at 3:00PM. For tickets and more information, click here.