Mozart in Trump Tower, and the art of getting political onstage
American theater director and UCLA World Arts and Cultures distinguished professor Peter Sellars is noted for histransformative interpretations of artistic masterpieces and for collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative artists.
Opera knows a little something about conflating Julius Caesar with an American president. It also knows a little something about Donald Trump.
In the early 1980s, a young director made a name for himself by staging a daring production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.” It opened with a news conference at a fancy international hotel by a cocksure U.S. president having just arrived in the oil-rich Middle East.
In both cases, Sellars wasn’t in the business of singling out individuals. Handel and Mozart were artists with great insight into society, and Sellars was instead seeking what light their work — work that has survived centuries — shined on our own values.
“The text of his speech,” as Peter Sellars wrote with strange prescience in his updated plot synopsis of an 18th century libretto, “concerns itself at length with the palm trees, which he clearly admires. Perhaps they remind him of Palm Beach. Let them belong to the victors.”
A few years later, Sellars famously set Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” in an apartment in the then-new Trump Tower, 52 floors above Fifth Avenue. This is the world, to quote Sellars’ plot synopsis of an old libretto again, of beautiful people for whom “perjury, loss of happiness and absence of consciousness can be compensated for by the feel of money, the sense of being on top and the sweet certainty that their own barren lives will be enriched by the amusement and consolation offered by the collapse of the hopes and plans of others.”
Neither of these examples, however, was a foretaste of the Public Theater’s recent production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” which portrayed Trump as the Roman emperor. Sellars did not presume direct correlation between past and present. The U.S. president was someone in the future, not specifically Ronald Reagan, then in office. The “Figaro” apartment in the Trump Tower was not Trump’s gilded one but a modern duplex dominated by a large Frank Stella-like painting. The Count in no way physically resembled Trump or his lifestyle.— Mark Swed, Jun. 22, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.