The Death of Imagination

Interesting symmetry: you saw the first performance, I saw the last one. I can't say that much changed between the two: the singing was fantastic, even if Davis' direction was turgid. The staging was still a mess (including Silvastrelli crawling across the stage in the first scene so he could die at his proper mark). I, too, was intrigued by the setting. They could have really done something with the tension between the conservatives and the liberals in Spain in the 20s, but, of course they didn't. In my head, I turned Ottavio into a proto-Fascist just to make his character more interesting (not helped by Poli's wooden performance). It all seemed to be so they could put Kwiecien in a tailcoat.