ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Renée Fleming’s “Così fan tutte” was ready to rumble.
Long a star soprano, Fleming made her directing debut Monday night at the Aspen Music Festival and School by transporting Mozart’s masterpiece from 18th century Naples, Italy, to a gym in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, amid professional wrestling’s rise in 1980.
Posters on stage display Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, wrestler Randy Savage and Jane Fonda hawking her workout video. In Fleming’s concept, Fiordiligi and Dorabella are workout-obsessed high school sisters.
“It’s a coming of age for the protagonists and a loss of innocence,” Fleming said.
An outstanding student cast ages 25-32 mostly making role debuts, was accompanied by conductor Patrick Summers leading a 45-piece orchestra at the 375-capacity Wheeler Opera House, opened in 1889 during the Colorado Silver Boom. There are two additional performances through Saturday at a festival that includes about 200 public events from July 2 to Aug. 24.
Lauren Carroll, the 26-year-old soprano who sings Fiordiligi, did a split. Dorabella, 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Brown, struggled to lift a heavy barbell. Michelle Harvey’s scenic design in the tight space of a 25-foot-wide proscenium included punching bags, bo staffs and ThighMasters.
Fleming sang her first Countess in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” as an Aspen student in 1984. Now 66, she has, since 2017, limited her singing to concerts, a few contemporary operas and Broadway.
Staging spark was at a hockey game
Fleming had a circuitous route to her concept.
“I can’t do the opera relating to hockey, but I did think of another sport that reminds me so much of opera and that’s professional wrestling. There’s a suspension of disbelief that is huge,” she said. “Fans believe these characters are real and that the moves are real, and of course it’s all completely choreographed.”
Fleming at first spoke with Francesca Zambello, the Washington National Opera’s artistic director.
“I said, `Convince me, sell me, tell me,’” Zambello related, ”`you really have to work it through from the overture to the final curtain.”
WNO’s “Così” in 2021 was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2020, Fleming and Summers launched Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS, with 15 singers annually attending an eight-week program that covers their $12,325 tuition, room and board plus pays a $1,500 stipend.
Wrestling family history
Ashlyn Brown, the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano who performs Dorabella, is a granddaughter of Don Stansauk, the wrestler known as Hard Boiled Haggerty.
“I grew up with wrestling culture,” she said. “I used to go to the Cauliflower Alley Club meetings when I was a kid. He brought all of his buddies, like Andre the Giant.”
Carroll was a cheerleader and her mother is an aerobics instructor.
“She really invests in young artists and it’s authentic,” she said of Fleming. “She really means it and backs it up with action.”
In creating the look, Fleming thought back to her time at Churchville-Chili Senior High School in New York.
“I have photographs of me with a really bad mullet and overalls,” she said.
Just before intermission ended, a Fonda dress-alike led the audience in calisthenics. Despina (soprano Laura Miah), a gym manager here instead of a maid, uses a blender to make protein shakes and heads stretching exercises.
“Renée of course demanded a lot of herself as a singer in that way and that’s extended itself to her demands on them in this,” Summers said.
Mozart’s opera has the two boyfriends adopt hidden identities and romance each other’s girlfriend to test their virtue. Both women fall for the other’s boyfriend, and while the two couples get back together in the original, Fleming has both relationships come apart. Fiordiligi ends up wearing an “ERA YES” shirt.
Don Alfonso is a gym owner. Guglielmo and Ferrando, the boyfriends (baritone Finn Sagal and tenor Jonghyun Park), wear Amanda Seymour’s colorful clothes, including powder blue and light gray tuxedos with ruffled shirts.
Peter Barber, a 31-year-old bass-baritone who sings Don Alfonso, boxes to keep in shape.
“When I was I think 8 or 9 years old after watching `Rocky,’ I had a custom boxing robe made for me,” he said.
Role a part of Fleming’s life for more than 30 years
Fleming sang Fiordiligi for the first time at Geneva in March 1992. She greeted the cast at the first rehearsal on June 30 by telling them: “Toi toi toi. Let’s have some fun,” using a performers’ expression for good luck.
“I’m astonished that someone who is such an extraordinary singer and performer, they are also an extraordinary stage director,” choreographer Sara Erde said. “She knows every note of the music, every word of the text.”
Fleming learned that unlike with singing, directing requires “million decisions that have to be made day to day.”
At WNO, Fleming had envisioned a set with a stadium-sized video screen. She hopes the staging has an extended life.
“If anybody wanted to do it, it would be really fun in a bigger theater with a budget,” she said. “Especially the time we’re in, it’s not a bad time to bring pro wrestling into opera because of the similarities, for the sheer novelty of it.”
