Leighton: Hercules fighting against Death for Alceste
An old opera gets new life in this production of ‘Alceste’
By Richard Dyer, [Boston] Globe Staff | January 23, 2005
Last May, Opera Boston general director Carole Charnow saw a production of Andre Previn’s operatic version of ”A Streetcar Named Desire” in Washington, D.C. She knew immediately she had found the director she wanted for the collaborative production of Gluck’s ”Alceste” that Opera Boston and Boston Baroque will present this week.
Brad Dalton, a Harvard alum from the mid-’80s, has worked as an assistant director at the Metropolitan and San Francisco operas and is now making a name on his own. He set ”Streetcar” not so much in a literal New Orleans as in the mind of the heroine, Blanche DuBois. It was the abstract but emotional quality of his staging that Charnow thought would be right for ”Alceste,” one of the oldest operas that remains in the international repertoire. Intelligent, emotional, and wired, Dalton talks a mile a minute in an accent redolent of his native Texas, hands flying.
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