The City & the Country no.60 – Jan 14 2015

Highlight of early 2015, Nolan and I visited Vermont for the re-mounting of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, our newly revised opera, by the Weston Opera Company. This diminutive, impoverished opera company somehow manage to survive in farthest rural Vermont, shuttling between their base, a tiny theater in Weston, and a huge newly refurbished theater in Rutland, the Paramount (more gilding than the whole of Venice – and I counted 40 cherubs), where we attended the first performance. Our brilliant designer, Naomie Kremer, took the extroardinary video sets she designed for San Francisco, and reduced them to a ‘single camera’ version for Vermont, not as spectacular but still mind-boggling in their beauty and effectiveness. From the new opening, on the train, brought to life by Naomie’s video taken inside a train compartment looking out across the Yorkshire moors, to the astonishing interiors with wallpaper that flickers – live, moving foliage superimposed on leafy designs (embodying Frances Hodgson Burnett’s creed, bringing the outdoor in and the indoor out) – to the surrealist splendor of the garden itself, successively in winter, spring and summer, her designs were the star of the show.

As the audience entered, an image of a sheep peacefully lying in the moorland greeted their eyes, until they gazed at it and were amazed to see that the sheep is cudding, and the grass faintly waving – it’s alive! Our cast was simply excellent, in places an improvement even over the top-of-the-line San Francisco cast, chosen from countrywide auditions. And the Vermont director came up with fine ideas which will go straight into our text. Above all, even the production’s limitations were exactly the right shock to my system. They freed me from the mesmerizing effect of the original sumptuous production and allowed me at last to step right back from the libretto, of which I had never been entirely proud, to see exactly where the passages are that let it down, and, more importantly, how to correct them. On the 5-hour drive back to Manhattan to get Nolan to his fight home to California, we sorted the whole opera out once more! – and now I’m convinced we have it in a shape which will delight Milwaukee, Tulsa, and Houston, some of the opera houses who’ve shown interest in mounting a production – inshallah!