ANTHONY Minghella, black baseball cap on his bald head, was running down the aisle a couple of weeks ago. "Lovely geishas," he said in his lilting English accent. "Be together.
Think together as a unit." The Academy Award-winning director of The English Patient, jogging back and forth between the dark auditorium and his actors on stage instead of stationing himself behind a camera, was the most visible sign of the regime change that has swept New York's Metropolitan Opera, known more for stubborn tradition than innovation. And his striking new production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, jammed by new general manager Peter Gelb into a schedule created five years ago, was the most significant start to a season at the venerable institution since the company's move to Lincoln Centre in 1966, and the boldest statement by a new Met boss since Rudolf Bing began his era in 1950 with an attention-grabbing Don Carlo.
Let the news ring out from Lincoln Centre. Send word by satellite radio. Trumpet it in Times Square, raved one critic.
An exciting new era was born at the staid old Metropolitan Opera on Monday night.
Given the vast swaths of empty red velvet seats at the 4000-capacity Met in recent years, Gelb felt a revolution was in order. The Met sold 77 per cent of its tickets last season, down from 93 per cent in 1999-2000.
After he was hired in October 2004, Gelb spent more than a year ensconced in an upstairs conference room planning an upheaval of the biggest classical music institution in the US. He took over on August 1, when Joseph Volpe's administration finished a 16-season term.
When, on opening night last week, patrons in evening dresses and tuxedos walked through the travertine arches, past the giant Marc Chagall murals and into an auditorium bathed in light from starburst Lobmeyer chandeliers, they saw a redesigned logo and posters and a new look to a playbill that had hardly changed in decades.
The titles that translate the opera had German in addition to English -- Spanish and Japanese could be added in the future; around the house are new flat-screen televisions, donated by Panasonic after an executive of the company was annoyed by the poor picture quality in the latecomers' room.
When the lights darkened, after music director James Levine led the annual opening-night rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, customers who paid up to $US5000 ($6700) each for the gala performance and supper saw a dark stage with no set, with a solitary geisha silhouetted by bright red light, an opening created by Minghella, choreographer Carolyn Choa (his wife), set designer Michael Levine and lighting designer Peter Mumford. The Met's days of Franco Zeffirelli filling the stage with extras in new productions were over.
There was a study that I read when I first came here that the average age of the audience was increasing by one year per year, and that a year or two ago, the average age was 65, Gelb says. Five or six years earlier, it had been close to 60. That's a truly frightening statistic.
And there is only one hope, one chance for opera to be successful, which is through these great directors.
Minghella, 52, is at the forefront of Gelb's initiatives. When Minghella arrived at the Met, he had the cast rehearse Puccini's tear-jerker without any music.
He spoke to them quietly and convincingly, and told them to think before they acted. He forced singers who have performed these roles many times in many places to strip away actions that had become routine.
He is working like he is in front of the camera, so he wants everything we do like a close-up, says Marcello Giordani, who sang Pinkerton.
I was used to always running back and forth on stage with other directors, 'Do some expression with your face ...
' But he taught me. I learned that less is good.
Opera director is an unusual role for Minghella, who wrote plays before going into the theatre.
Movie directors can tinker with the script. All my professional life I've been a tailor rather than interpreter, he says, going on to imagine a conversation with the composer over some clunky section. I think if Puccini were here, I'd say to him: 'You know what, maestro, let's lose that now.
It doesn't really have any meaning'.
But the score and libretto were established 100 years ago, when Puccini's creation was reworked for the Paris Opera after an initial stumble at La Scala in 1904 and a revision for Brescia later that year. Minghella believes his job is to tell the story while getting out of its way.
But collaborating with a conductor took some getting used to. I am used to being the emperor -- perhaps with no clothes -- but nevertheless the emperor in the world that I work in, he says.
His most contentious decision was to use a Japanese bunraku puppet to represent Cio-Cio-San's toddler son.
When the production first appeared at London's English National Opera last year, some found it disconcerting.
Minghella thought of the puppet after nearly abandoning the project in its early stages at the ENO, frustrated that he couldn't cast Cio-Cio-San the way he wanted to.
I said, 'How many good teenage Japanese sopranos are there?
' which was a question greeted with complete bewilderment by the team there, he recalls late one afternoon after a rehearsal. They said, 'There are no Japanese sopranos, and certainly none that has the voice to sing this part. You'll be looking at a 40-year-old woman, if you're lucky, a Caucasian woman.
' And I said, 'Well, then we won't do the opera.' And I went away for a year.
Then he had what he calls an epiphany, realising that theatre is about imagination .
Once I had that epiphany, all kinds of things fell into place, not the least the fact that if you don't have a 15-year-old Japanese girl, then why are you casting three-year-old children? You see children unleashed on the stage who, of course, can't perform because at three you have no inner being.
His Butterfly was a hit in London, winning an Olivier Award.
Gelb created a buzz around its opening in New York. He decided to open the dress rehearsal to the public and the line for free tickets wound for about a quarter of a mile when the Met box office distributed them.
He also arranged for opening night to be simulcast on screens at Lincoln Centre Plaza and Times Square.
It's part of a media plan that will have up to four operas a week broadcast on radio and six a season televised in high definition to movie theatres in North America and Europe, performances that will be televised later.
Minghella, like Gelb, wants opera to have a populist bent. He applauds Gelb's decision to start a workshop that could lead to new operas from composers that include Adam Guettel, Jake Heggie, Wynton Marsalis and Rufus Wainwright, and a librettist group highlighted by Tony Kushner and John Guare.
I think Peter Gelb understands that the commissioning, the risk-taking, has to happen, and it will have an inbuilt failure quotient to it, but they should be glorious failures, Minghella says.
Now in the general manager's office, with its 3.8m ceiling, a Frank Gehry table and 12 William Kentridge prints behind his desk, Gelb says his changes mirror moves made a half-century ago.
When Rudolf Bing was the general manager, he was bringing Broadway directors here. When Jimmy Levine was the young music director, he had a partner in John Dexter. David Hockney was designing scenery.
The Met was at the forefront of the opera world.
Gelb hopes to attract other directors from outside the usual opera crowd. The Met right now is the talk of the opera world, I would say, because of all these new initiatives, he says.
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