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Jul. 5th, 2008 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akeyoftimeA disgustingly long time ago, my brother and I sat down to watch the Met's 2007 production of Eugene Onegin. It's an opera written by the ever well-known Tchaikovsky in 1879 and tells the story of an ultimately doomed love affair between the title character and Tatiana. For the most part, the story moved along at a reasonable place (okay, so it did move slowly no matter how you slice it, but still enjoyed it) and the performers were all great. What really blew me away, what still gets me excited just thinking about it, is the set design. (It is probably no coincidence that set design and construction was the area of tech theatre that I found most interesting.)
It's not a shot of the whole stage, but it does give you an idea of the basic design (austere is a good word for it!) This shot was taken during the Ouverture; as Onegin reads in a chair centerstage, leaves begin to fall. They already cover the stage and in just a moment, will help create the feel of an outdoor space. Harder to see is that there are three tall panels which make up back and side walls which define the acting area. The actors have the whole stage to run, sing, kill, laugh, woo, and occasionally, to dance in; the tall white walls (the height gave it all a rather majestic feeling, indoor or outdoor setting), coloured with washes, were the only major set pieces. I really love the simple design and the way colours are used so heavily to indicate setting and tone.
Okay, so you can see a few dark lines meant to be trees, again playing up the idea of an outside space. The leaves and trees last for only the first act, though, as there's only one more outdoor scene after this act. Some small furniture was brought out during the early numbers, when everyone was singing about hunting and preparing feasts and having a bit of a pre-party party. The leaves are probably a lot less simple than they look (you'd track them everywhere so quickly!), but anything that looks like a really big piles of leaves that can be crunched through makes me happy.
A few more songs and dances (we'll come back to that later) and the second act opened. That was when I fell madly in love :P
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell the full set-up (let alone get the full impression) from this picture, which is the best I could find, but the idea is that you've got a large rectangle of old fashioned, mismatched, wooden chairs. That's all there is to see when the curtain goes up. (By now, the lights have lost their autumnal gleam and are into the cooler tones now, to indicate the nighttime setting.)
The revelers start to pour in from the wings and quickly fill up the box of chairs, dancing and laughing. Suddenly, on such a large stage, a very well defined and intimate atmosphere has sprung to life. When characters needed to speak aside, they simply stepped outside the box and were in a hallway, an adjoining room, a garden, whatever you can come up with. It's just a row of chairs, but there's a wall there when it's needed and it's brilliant. But because they were chairs, you could also take down the imaginary wall and have people peering in on the scenes taking place inside the ring of chairs, still clearly taking place in a crowded room, but made intimate by the low barrier.
From there, and we're sadly pictureless, the set is stipped of everything but colour on the walls for a duel at dawn between two best friends. They re-use the chairs from the second act, to a much, much lesser extent (mostly to define the back of the space) in the third act, when Onegin attends a rather grand party put on by a noble. (The previous party was a rather country and more bourgeios affair.) By not marking off the space so clearly this time, we get a much grander sense of scale, which is exactly what I imagine was intended. One more set change and all there was was a green chair, nice enough to indicate wealth, but also a nice bit of symetry with the Ouverture, when Onegin was sitting centre-stage on a single chair.
In conclusion, let's have a flashback to the first act.
In this scene, Tatiana professes her love to Onegin, who refuses her pretty flat out. The reasons don't matter, because this is a russian love story, which means that there has to be heartbreak and missed connections. This is also the first russian love story I've managed to finish, so I'm not really sure if they're all supposed to end in tragedy, or if this is the only one that does (it seems unlikely!)
Anyway. During a folk song, which were typically used in this period, when Russian opera composers were injecting the "russian" into "russian opera" (which had previously been all in and in the style of the Italians or the French, depending on the favour of the current Tsar or his wife), the women singing had swept clear a circle in the leaves. This nice sized space was used first to help create define an indoor bedroom, the only indoor scene of the first act and used again later on to help define an intimate setting for the crushing talk between Onegin and Tatiana. At the end of the first act, if memory serves, we're left with the image of our herione sobbing in this small clearing, which drew the eye just as effectively as any spot could have.
If a long livejournal ode hasn't already spelled it out, I really loved the clever uses of a space when they left so much of it bare. The way a blank cavas became so many environments and communicated so many emotions and ideas was brilliant. Well done, production team!
It's not a shot of the whole stage, but it does give you an idea of the basic design (austere is a good word for it!) This shot was taken during the Ouverture; as Onegin reads in a chair centerstage, leaves begin to fall. They already cover the stage and in just a moment, will help create the feel of an outdoor space. Harder to see is that there are three tall panels which make up back and side walls which define the acting area. The actors have the whole stage to run, sing, kill, laugh, woo, and occasionally, to dance in; the tall white walls (the height gave it all a rather majestic feeling, indoor or outdoor setting), coloured with washes, were the only major set pieces. I really love the simple design and the way colours are used so heavily to indicate setting and tone.
Okay, so you can see a few dark lines meant to be trees, again playing up the idea of an outside space. The leaves and trees last for only the first act, though, as there's only one more outdoor scene after this act. Some small furniture was brought out during the early numbers, when everyone was singing about hunting and preparing feasts and having a bit of a pre-party party. The leaves are probably a lot less simple than they look (you'd track them everywhere so quickly!), but anything that looks like a really big piles of leaves that can be crunched through makes me happy.
A few more songs and dances (we'll come back to that later) and the second act opened. That was when I fell madly in love :P
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell the full set-up (let alone get the full impression) from this picture, which is the best I could find, but the idea is that you've got a large rectangle of old fashioned, mismatched, wooden chairs. That's all there is to see when the curtain goes up. (By now, the lights have lost their autumnal gleam and are into the cooler tones now, to indicate the nighttime setting.)
The revelers start to pour in from the wings and quickly fill up the box of chairs, dancing and laughing. Suddenly, on such a large stage, a very well defined and intimate atmosphere has sprung to life. When characters needed to speak aside, they simply stepped outside the box and were in a hallway, an adjoining room, a garden, whatever you can come up with. It's just a row of chairs, but there's a wall there when it's needed and it's brilliant. But because they were chairs, you could also take down the imaginary wall and have people peering in on the scenes taking place inside the ring of chairs, still clearly taking place in a crowded room, but made intimate by the low barrier.
From there, and we're sadly pictureless, the set is stipped of everything but colour on the walls for a duel at dawn between two best friends. They re-use the chairs from the second act, to a much, much lesser extent (mostly to define the back of the space) in the third act, when Onegin attends a rather grand party put on by a noble. (The previous party was a rather country and more bourgeios affair.) By not marking off the space so clearly this time, we get a much grander sense of scale, which is exactly what I imagine was intended. One more set change and all there was was a green chair, nice enough to indicate wealth, but also a nice bit of symetry with the Ouverture, when Onegin was sitting centre-stage on a single chair.
In conclusion, let's have a flashback to the first act.
In this scene, Tatiana professes her love to Onegin, who refuses her pretty flat out. The reasons don't matter, because this is a russian love story, which means that there has to be heartbreak and missed connections. This is also the first russian love story I've managed to finish, so I'm not really sure if they're all supposed to end in tragedy, or if this is the only one that does (it seems unlikely!)
Anyway. During a folk song, which were typically used in this period, when Russian opera composers were injecting the "russian" into "russian opera" (which had previously been all in and in the style of the Italians or the French, depending on the favour of the current Tsar or his wife), the women singing had swept clear a circle in the leaves. This nice sized space was used first to help create define an indoor bedroom, the only indoor scene of the first act and used again later on to help define an intimate setting for the crushing talk between Onegin and Tatiana. At the end of the first act, if memory serves, we're left with the image of our herione sobbing in this small clearing, which drew the eye just as effectively as any spot could have.
If a long livejournal ode hasn't already spelled it out, I really loved the clever uses of a space when they left so much of it bare. The way a blank cavas became so many environments and communicated so many emotions and ideas was brilliant. Well done, production team!
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Date: 2008-07-05 08:09 pm (UTC)