The Rake's Progress: the TV vision of the world's greatest director

telegraph.co.uk     05-Jul-2008            

Robert Lepage talks to Jasper Rees about staging Stravinsky Earlier in his career Robert Lepage, the great Canadian maestro of multimedia theatre, was advised by fellow directors not to go anywhere near opera. Radical take: Lepage has moved The Rake's Progress to the fleshpots and dream factories of a post-war America of the Forties "'Directors and conductors always fight' - that's one of the things I had been warned about," he says. "'The singers can't act, they don't move, they won't do what you want, and choruses are horrible.'" It was with these words ringing in his ears that Lepage finally accepted an invitation from the Canadian Opera Company on condition that he could direct "an opera with no chorus and very few singers". His double bill of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, which has a cast of two, and Schoenberg's... [read full story]                    

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