Shawna Lucey’s Own Take on a Verdi Opera

The last time that Shawna Lucey directed a San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata was in the fall of 2017, when she was responsible for reviving a staging by John Copley that had been in the SFO repertoire since 1987. For the most part, that revival was a disappointing experience, leading me to write that “Shawna Lucey seemed desperately out of her element in her efforts to bring Copley’s vision to the stage for the current run.” However, there was one high point during the second scene of the second act, in which the entertainment included some of the female guests dressing up as Spanish gypsies; and one of the women kept fumbling her steps with comic timing worthy of Charlie Chaplin. (Needless to say, that one swallow did not make for much of a spring.)

The provocative costuming for the second scene of the second act of La Traviata (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

For this season’s Traviata, which opened this past Friday evening, Lucey was given the liberty to create her own staging. Sadly, left to her own devices, she was as much “out of her element” as she had been in reviving Copley’s staging. Indeed, that one witty turn in the second act was inflated to the entire party scene involving provocative costuming that did little to distract from the hodgepodge staging.

On the more serious side, during the first confrontation that Violetta Valéry (soprano Pretty Yende, making her SFO debut) has with Giorgio Germont (baritone Simone Piazzola, also making an SFO debut), there was a repetitiveness to the staging that undermined the seriousness of the situation. The good news was that both Yende and Piazzola delivered compelling vocal accounts that rose above the shortcomings in staging; and the same could be said of tenor Jonathan Tetelman’s account (another SFO debut) of Alfredo Germont (which, over the course of the entire opera, covers with widest extent of emotional dispositions). Finally, Caroline H. Hume Music Director Eun Sun Kim offered a particularly attentive account of the instrumental portion of Verdi’s score, managing to keep the oompah accompaniment of the opening Prelude at bay, thus preparing the audience for the theme’s tragic emergence when sung by Valéry.

Taken as a whole, there was an abundance of satisfaction to be mined from the experience of listening to this performance of La Traviata; but too many elements of the staging did little more than distract from the joy of listening.