Kristen and I have been to the opera twice recently, once in Vienna and once in New York. Both of these stagings, one by a small company and one by the Mighty Metropolitan, have been what we'll call 'updates' of venerable old classics. What I mean is that they left the music alone, but the sets and costumes, and therefore the place of the story, were quite removed from anything that would have been part of the original production.

This isn't anything new. Updated Shakespeare--Hamlet on a motorcycle, Macbeth as part of a street gang in 1950s New York, anything to relieve the tedium of presenting the same works exactly the same way every time--has become quite the fashion for opera and theater companies for as far back as I remember (which is only a couple of decades, by the way!). Sometimes the production is simply moved, lock, stock, and barrel (to borrow a phrase from the distant past) into a new century and a new place. In other productions, the whole idea of time and place seems completely obliterated and fantastical and experimental elements take over the set, and the people who inhabit them. Once, a few years ago, Kristen was watching a very 'avant-garde' staging of Parsifal in Germany. She fell asleep at some point and when she woke up there were electric sheep on the stage! I don't know Parsifal very well, but I feel pretty certain that Wagner did not include any parts for electric sheep. (besides, the tenors wouldn't like the competition)