Directing La traviata

By Walter J. Lyng, September 5th, 2012

Michael Cavanagh has to explain himself a lot. Despite the fact that he has acted as stage director for a very professional opera company in Canada, his actual job description seems to elude most.
“My own mother barely knows what I do,” he says. “A lot of people think that operas aren't directed - they're conducted. I tell a lot of people that I'm the director of the show and they say 'Oh, you're in the pit with the orchestra, waving your arms.' No. That guy, or gal, is responsible for everything that's hitting your ears. I am responsible for everything that's hitting your eyes.”
At the moment Cavanagh is devoting all of his time to ensuring that the Opéra de Montréal's season opening production of Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata will hit people's eyes in a way that is both new and complimentary of the timeless lyrics and score.
“My job is to have a point of view on the story, not just to trot it out,” he says. “Any piece of theatre has to be relevant to an audience; otherwise we're just keeping a museum and blowing the dust off it.” In this production, the familiar tale of Violetta, the fallen woman, has been transplanted into a new setting.
“We've made the decision to update the era,” says Cavanagh. “The original era is mid 1800s and we've moved it to what is maybe more of a familiar era now, which is just before the beginning of the First World War that informs a lot of the behaviour and the outfits and the underlying issues that these characters are grappling with.”
And although the action takes place a century in the past in this version, Cavanagh maintains that our present day society isn't that far-removed from the era.
“It's a time of great upheaval,” he says. “It's also a time that relates to our modern age in a lot of ways. In Europe and especially in Paris, it was the Belle Époque. Everything seemed possible and they were just about to head into this really grim time of financial problems. It sort of feels very much like the way our culture was a couple of years ago. There was great prosperity in the Western world and it seemed like the party would never end. Of course we know it does.”
The beauty of classic operatic pieces, according to Cavanagh, is that they are, in fact, so adaptable. “It reminds us that these are universal stories,” he says. “These are not stories rooted in a particular time and place. It applies to human behavior and the things that really drive us and the things that are going on in our intimate lives as it relates to the big public sphere that we all play in.”
While Cavanagh has worked on his fare share of traviata productions, this one, imported from the Minnesota Opera, is a new ball game for him.
“I always like to treat it as if I haven't ever done it before,” he says.
“That's the exciting thing for me.”
Having only recently met with Greek soprano Myrto Papatanasiu, who will be taking on the role of Violetta, and with a relatively short rehearsal period leading up to the opening on Saturday, Sept. 15, Cavanagh says he will be approaching his task of stage direction in his usual collaborative fashion.
“I'm always the kind of director that loves to take cues from the people that are in my cast,” he says. “I'm not a puppeteer.”
For more information, visit http://www.operademontreal.com