By R. Scott Reedy
Not long after theater and opera director Anne Bogart was approached by Boston Lyric Opera about staging Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, she came to a realization about the Hungarian composer’s expressionist 1911 opera that helped shape her approach to it. “I had not given it much thought, but I was excited to do it because I love Bartók. His music is so dynamic and powerful, and this is his only opera. And it’s so dark and labyrinthine,” explained Bogart by Zoom recently from London. “But as I looked into it, it occurred to me that it is also the most male-centered opera ever written.”
Looking to leaven what she calls Bartók’s “extremely male” approach to the story of Bluebeard’s Castle – based on the 17th-century French folktale La Barbe bleue by Charles Perrault – Bogart offered a suggestion. “The opera is only around an hour long, so it’s usually done with a companion piece,” says the director. “I said to the folks at the BLO that I felt the other composer should be a woman, so that there is a balance between male and female.” According to Bogart, David Angus, BLO Music Director, came up with the “ingenious idea” of Alma Mahler being the other composer. “Mahler, a contemporary of Bartók’s, was extremely talented as a composer and in many other ways. She was married to famous men – Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel – and had affairs with others including Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Oskar Kokoschka. She sublimated her own talent to these men, and it seemed to me that there’s something in that relationship between Alma Mahler and the Judith character.
“In the original tale, there are six wives of Bluebeard, and in the opera there are only three. But I thought, what if we go back to six? So, as the audience is coming in, they enter a kind of Viennese café with a pianist playing works by other female composers, and while the crowd is mingling, six women dressed in beautiful Viennese gowns process through to the main performance space, with the audience following them.” Set in the early 20th century, the BLO production will feature Mahler’s 1915 Four Songs sung in German, while Bluebeard’s Castle will be performed in English. “The woman who plays Judith then goes to a piano and sings the first two Mahler songs,” says Bogart. “At the end of the second number, she speaks text from the opera that welcomes the audience and lets them know they are about to enter into something quite dark. As she speaks, you suddenly hear the bass-baritone voice of Bluebeard, inviting her into his castle. She hesitates, but then goes into the castle. We will see that Judith clearly really loves Count Bluebeard, but she may also be heading to a kind of doom – like Alma, whose brilliance was extinguished by her relationships with famous men.”
Bogart’s own particular brand of brilliance first gained notice four decades ago, when she began blazing new trails in theater – in one instance quite literally. While teaching at New York University, she set South Pacific in a mental institution for veterans where the patients perform the musical as therapy – a production that remains a vivid memory for the director. “During one performance, there was a fire under the stage. We called the fire department and five or six fire trucks responded. I went to the lobby and all these firemen were coming in with their hoses,” says Bogart. Not sure that the axiom “the show must go on” applied in the case of fire, Bogart sought out the fire captain.
“I kept running after him, saying, ‘We’re doing South Pacific, should we stop? Should we get the audience out?’ He finally said. You don’t need to stop the performance.’ “And so, in the middle of ‘Bali Ha’I’ in act one, six or seven firemen walked onto the stage with their hoses and wandered around looking at the space. Thankfully, the fire below was extinguished. And at intermission, an audience member came up to me and said, ‘That was genius. How did you do that?’” recalls Bogart with bemusement. “The production had heft, so they went with it, although I still can’t believe people thought it was part of the show.”
Audiences have long marveled at Bogart’s ground-breaking artistry. In 1992, she co-founded and became co-artistic director of the New York-based Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI), where she directed some 30 works at venues worldwide. An ensemble group, SITI took innovative approaches to original creations and the re-imagining of classics, often by ancient Greek playwrights. Late last year, SITI ended its producing activities. With her three-decade tenure at SITI at a close, Bogart – recipient of honorary doctorates from the Cornish School of the Arts, Bard College, and Skidmore College, as well as a Duke Artist Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship, and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency Fellowship – says the company will always be a significant part of her legacy. “I’m most proud of our ensemble. For 30 years, people wouldn’t leave SITI. They just felt great ownership of it. And I’m talking about the actors, the designers, and the administrators,” says Bogart. “They were incredibly loyal. I think the way we were able to work collaboratively with each other and to work out issues together was something that I hope is a model for other companies – a way to be together based in respect.”
A professor at Columbia University and head of the school’s MFA directing program, where her students have included Diane Paulus, Rachel Chavkin, and Darko Tresnjak, Bogart has staged numerous operas, including Handel’s Alcina, Dvořák’s Dimitrij, Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars, Verdi’s Macbeth, Bellini’s Norma, and Bizet’s Carmen. Born in Newport, R.I., Bogart now divides her time between homes in New York and London with her wife, Rena Fogel. “We lived together for 12 years in New York City and one day Rena just literally woke up and said ‘I miss London. That’s where I grew up.’ And also my stepdaughter, Rena’s daughter, lives in London,” explains Bogart. “Rena wanted to be near her so I said, ‘We’ll just go back and forth.’”
For Bogart – the author of five books including The Art of Resonance, released by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2021 – that travel schedule has often included stops in Boston where, in spring 2019, she directed BLO’s production of the highly acclaimed East Coast premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale, an opera by composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley, based on Margaret Atwood’s best-selling novel. For her current BLO engagement, Bogart collaborated with set designer Sara Brown, who created a set and pre-show performance spaces that work in conjunction with the director’s vision exploring how spaces can be gendered – a “feminine” salon that’s light and bright juxtaposed with a “masculine” VIP room that feels like a traditional gentleman’s club. Well acquainted with immersive theater, Bogart praises BLO for being “very adventurous” in selecting locations for its installation operas. These have included the Steriti Memorial Ice Rink, Cyclorama, and JFK Presidential Library in Boston, and Temple Ohabei Shalom in Brookline. “What BLO took on when they chose to stage The Handmaid’s Tale in a basketball gymnasium, and now with Bluebeard’s Castle, is massive,” points out Bogart. “It takes so much more to be able to produce something like that than it does to do it in just a normal theater. So I’m really thrilled to be back with them.”
She also finds great appeal in her current venue, Flynn Cruiseport Boston, previously known as Black Falcon Cruise Terminal. “We’re thinking of the whole experience, including the fact that the audience goes up an escalator to get there. There’s a huge sign that says, ‘To the Ships.’ It’s gorgeous. So the audience’s journey is quite interesting and we take it all into consideration,” she says. It was during her research that Bogart became aware of the role this particular setting would play in her work. “I was studying the piece, and then I went to see the site and realized that a lot of decisions had to be made around what that specific architecture is, down to the fact that the audience is on three sides. That’s a huge consideration, as are the length of the space, the ceiling height, the angle the singers stand at, and where the tables are placed for the six wives. “Really, what a director does is translate ideas into time and space. That’s what you try to do, and you have to translate this particular piece into the real dimensions of a special reality,” explains the Bard College and New York University graduate. “How a production sits for an audience, from where they are looking at it, determines pretty much all of your decisions.”
Bogart says that when it comes to directing opera, she is usually drawn to “chestnuts,” but she believes Bartók is worth making an exception. “I like dealing with something that has a history that the audience knows. The audience at South Pacific knew the source material, but they didn’t know what they were going to see in our production. People don’t necessarily know Bluebeard’s Castle that well, but it does have some of the most beautiful music of any opera ever written. “And here, the merging of Mahler with Bartók also leads in the end, when the final two of the Four Songs are sung, to a surprising outcome.”
R. Scott Reedy is an arts writer based in Braintree, Massachusetts. His features and reviews appear regularly in The Patriot Ledger, MetroWest Daily News, and Telegram & Gazette, across the Gannett Media/USA TODAY Network, and at Yahoo.com.