Published: July 03, 2008 08:22 am         

Glimmerglass scenery harks back to the Bard

By PETER WYNNE

A really good stage setting is like a house of mirrors, and the scenery John Conklin has designed for the 2008 Glimmerglass Opera Festival is a perfect example. Everywhere you look, the design reflects some interesting detail about the Glimmerglass theater or the shows that will be mounted there this year.

Here’s an example: The scenery is limited to a single setting that will serve all four works that will be in repertory through the summer. The set looks like it’s built from heavy timbers (scenery is rarely what it seems), and it’s painted a cool, silvery gray, the color of well-weathered wood. Back in the 1980s, when Hugh Hardy designed the Alice Busch Opera Theater, where Glimmerglass performs, the celebrated New York architect found his inspiration for the exterior shapes of the building, its metal roofs, woodsheathed walls and its color scheme in the barns he found on the Glimmerglass property and saw on nearby farms.

Conklin’s scenery calls to mind those same barns and, in effect, carries the outside of the theater building inside and right up onto the stage.

Beyond that, timbers like those Conklin specified were used to frame all large wooden buildings in centuries past, including the Globe Theater, where so many of William Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. And this season, all four works in the festival repertory have a link to Shakespeare.

The 42-performance 2008 Glimmerglass season opens Saturday night with Cole Porter’s 1948 Broadway hit “Kiss Me, Kate.” A lot of it would qualify as light opera, really, and writers Sam and Bella Spewack used “The Taming of the Shrew” as their point of departure. Next comes George Frideric Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” which bows Sunday afternoon. This 1724 masterpiece has a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym, himself a fine composer, and features two of the leading characters found in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Later in the month, the other two works arrive: Opening July 19 is Richard Wagner’s “Das Liebesverbot,” and the first Glimmerglass performance will be a North American premiere: This 1834 opera, which its composer based on Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” has never been fully staged before on this continent.

The last arrival will be Vincenzo Bellini’s 1830 “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” which comes to the Glimmerglass stage July 29. Telling essentially the same story as “Romeo and Juliet,” the book is by the 19th-century Italian poet Felice Romani, who used the same sources Shakespeare had. All four works will then continue to play in rotating repertory through Aug. 24.

“Last year we had four operas based on the myth of Orpheus,” designer Conklin said in a recent chat at his studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Each had a totally different set by a totally different designer, but linked by that one story.

“This summer we thought, ‘Why not try something that has never been done before at Glimmerglass, which is to do a basic set which is then modified for the four operas. Shakespeare wrote most of his plays for the Globe Theater, where they had a basic set modified by costumes and props. That’s what we’re doing here this summer — a single set based on the Globe.” Views of London from the early 17th century show a building believed to be the Globe, which was built in 1599 on the south side of the River Thames, roughly opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s said that in its day the Globe was the biggest and best-equipped theater in London.

And what those early views show is a rounded structure several stories tall, with a courtyard in the middle that opens to the sky — a “wooden O,” as the Chorus says in “Henry V.”

Contemporary descriptions and drawings suggest the building was timberframed and had stuccoed exterior walls.

The courtyard was surrounded by raised, roofed galleries from which the wealthier theatergoer could watch plays performed on a stage thrusting out into the courtyard.

What was needed, Conklin says, was an evocation of the Globe that would fit the Alice Busch theater, with its roofed auditorium and proscenium fronting a raised stage. What he could do was to evoke an idea of the Globe, which had columns, staircases and two levels on which the players could perform. The Glimmerglass setting also had to be flexible enough for works that span two and a quarter centuries and which reflect the staging requirements of three very different theatrical traditions — the baroque with Handel, the romantic with Bellini and Wagner and the modern with Cole Porter — and which vary tremendously in mood.

“The setting couldn’t be in any sense a reproduction of the Globe, nor did we really want it to be. What I wanted was to create a ghost structure of the Globe Theater, almost a line drawing of the Globe,” Conklin said.

His setting is an open timber framework, a skeleton that soars nearly 30 feet above the stage floor and fills most of the upstage area. It’s what an Elizabethan theater might have looked like if it were cut in half from top to bottom, and its wooden panels, stucco and thatching were stripped away to reveal the timber framing inside the walls and supporting the upper floors and roof.

“What I did has an airiness and an openness because I didn’t want the feeling to get too heavy,” the designer says. “We needed a flexibility of mood which over the four works goes from the bel canto tragedy of Bellini to the lightness of Cole Porter and the Broadway musical.” The two-level set holds the downstage playing area in a loose, curving embrace, and having two levels is a must: No one would try to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet without a balcony. And if you have a balcony, you’ve got to have stairs, and 16 stair units, mounted on caster wheels, are available to be placed around the set, two or three at a time, to change the look of the basic setting as well as to allow access to the balcony, and to be themselves places for the performers to act and sing. “Originally, we weren’t going to do much changing between the operas,” Conklin continued, “but as I worked with the four directors — each opera has its own director, its own costume designer, its own lighting designer — I realized that it would be nice to be able to change the space a little bit for each opera.

“I also wanted it to not be the Globe; I wanted it to be our Globe, our drawing of it, so to speak. And we’re going to paint the wood with a kind of silvery gray stain so it will have a ghostlike feeling, a dream quality.”

Conklin has columns that tower above mere mortals, standing 22 feet, 9 inches tall. Two are used in the Handel and Bellini operas, one for the Cole Porter piece and none in the Wagner.

“The columns are based on those that stood in the Globe Theater,” Conklin said. “For each opera, there are also flying pieces, but still it’s all within the general world of the Globe Theater. And we can play against the silvery gray with bright colors, as in the costumes and props for ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ and ‘Giulio Cesare,’ or we can have pale, muted browns and blacks and grays as in the Bellini.”

One fascinating aspect of Conklin’s quite skeletal setting is that it has a skeleton of its own. The “timbers” are hollow and have steel “bones.” What the audience sees as timbers are shells made of pine boards that enclose 16-gauge steel framing. Some of the timbers, if they were genuine, would have cross sections measuring 9 by 9 inches and would be many feet in length. The cost of timbers like that plus all the smaller beams would have been astronomical, the designer explains.

Using hollow beams with steel cores was the less costly route, Conklin says, even though the steel skeleton required cutting and welding more than 5,000 joints, and it took more than 5,000 linear feet of 1-inch clear pine boards to make up the shells.

Glimmerglass technical director Abby Rodd, who supervised the construction, said that to do all the work this set required she had two technicians laboring 40 hours a week through the winter, then added three more to the crew during April and May and had all of them working 48 hours a week. The scenic work was done on the premises, as it usually is.

For John Conklin, this splendid construction is a last hurrah. At the end of this season, he steps down as associate artistic director after 18 years with the company. He came to Glimmerglass in 1991 as designer of costumes and scenery for the first American professional staging of Mozart’s “Il Re Pastore.”

He arrived with credits including designs for several Broadway productions and for the Metropolitan Opera and opera houses across America and across the Atlantic. His 2008 Glimmerglass design is his 29th set for the company.

Other Glimmerglass credits include “Lizzie Borden,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” “Bluebeard,” “The Good Soldier Sheik,” “La Fanciulla del West,” “Lucie de Lammermoor” and, last summer, the Gluck/ Berlioz “Orphee et Eurydice.”

“First I became director of productions at Glimmerglass, then associate artistic director, which means things going on all year,” Conklin said, “and I also teach at New York University. I used to travel a lot, but I’ve not been able to do that because between the two organizations I have no time free. I’ve decided to cut back so I can have that time.

“Also, I’ve spent most of my years here working under Paul Kellogg as artistic director, and now we have Michael MacLeod in that post. Michael has been very gracious to me, but I think he should have his own team in place. He has a very interesting vision for the company and needs his own people to help take him there.”

In addition to the four operas, the Glimmerglass orchestra, chorus and soloists will also offer two concert performances of Felix Mendelssohn’s complete “Incidental Music to Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’” with excerpts from the play. The dates are Aug. 3 and 17.

The Alice Busch Opera Theater is on State Route 80, eight miles north of Cooperstown, overlooking Lake Otsego (at least when the trees are bare). For tickets or further information, you can visit the company website at www.glimmerglass.org or phone 547-2255.

Peter Wynne is a free-lance writer whose articles have appeared in more than a dozen newspapers and in Opera News, Spotlight, New Jersey Monthly, and Metropolitan and New York City Opera, Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center programs.