Opera, like all music theater, is a hybrid art form — a mix of music, drama, design, and sometimes dance. In great productions — which, in truth, are pretty rare — each of those elements supports the others. That requires a creative team with both good ideas and mutual respect.
Conductor Speranza Scappucci and stage director James Darrah, who are staging the Music Academy of the West’s production of The Elixir of Love, had never met before arriving in Santa Barbara. But as they described their way of working, their compatibility became clear. While one focuses on text and stagecraft and the other on music, neither is working in a vacuum.
“I think part of the director’s job is to respond to the music and to look at how the text is rendered musically,” said Darrah, a St. Louis native who is based in Los Angeles. “I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to render the characters’ thought processes dramatically in a way that bolsters the music rather than competes with it.”