Is the Future of American Opera Unfolding in Detroit?

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Last September, as cultural organizations began their fall seasons in a state of crisis, unsure if audiences would venture from their homes in the midst of a pandemic, Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater, decided to mount a show called “Bliss.” A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours.

Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976; infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage. The sight of cars parked beneath moldering Renaissance-style plasterwork and traces of long-gone balconies has long proved irresistible to Detroit ruin photographers, but no one before Sharon had ever staged a live performance among them. The production was pay-what-you-like, and those of us in the audience reached the performance space by walking up a ramp. Looking over its edge, I spotted a dusty Jeep parked on a lower level with the words LIONS SUCK traced on the windshield. A pair of low stages, minimally dressed to set a banquet scene, had been assembled, and the rest of the space was hauntingly lit, with an orchestra on the same level as the audience, whose members were free to sit or orbit at their leisure, entering or leaving at any part of the show, which began at noon and ended at midnight. Sharon paced the perimeter in a bow tie, a colorful jacket and yellow sneakers.

Now 42, Sharon is the most visionary opera director of his generation. He founded an experimental company, cheekily named the Industry, in Los Angeles in 2012, and was met with near-immediate acclaim for stagings so wildly inventive they often dispensed with stages altogether. A 2013 production of “Invisible Cities,” the composer Christopher Cerrone’s adaptation of Italo Calvino’s imaginary travelogue, took place in Los Angeles’s Union Station, one of the busiest passenger railroad terminals in the country; performers moved around the space as concertgoers listened on wireless headphones (and commuters raced for their trains). A 2015 opera inspired by Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” — a novel whose chapters can be read sequentially or by “hopscotching” around the book — recreated the format in Los Angeles traffic: Audience members would enter one of 24 limousines, each of which also contained performers, and proceed along one of three routes, occasionally changing cars or stopping at key landmarks to witness vignettes. Other Sharon productions have combined live singers with green screens and digital animation, stuck performers inside a giant glass vitrine and redeployed defunct air-raid sirens to broadcast music onto city streets. In 2017, Sharon was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant; the following year, he became the first American to direct at Bayreuth, the Wagnerian opera festival founded by Richard Wagner himself in 1876. The conductor Gustavo Dudamel — the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Sharon served a three-year residency as artist-collaborator — told me in an email that Sharon was a “creative genius” who “understands the heart of every piece and takes us there through a vision that is incomparable.”

And yet Sharon’s boldest venture may have been the announcement, in 2020, that he would be accepting a position as artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater — since renamed, at Sharon’s insistence, Detroit Opera. It’s hard to overstate the unlikelihood of a director as innovative and internationally celebrated as Sharon taking the reins of a decidedly regional (and in certain respects conservative) opera company like Detroit’s. But today, nearly two years into his five-year contract, Sharon has already radically elevated Detroit Opera’s status in the larger cultural ecosystem. His first production in Detroit — a drive-through, socially distant version of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” in a downtown parking structure — received a rave from Alex Ross in The New Yorker: The piece “would have been a triumph in any season,” Ross wrote, but it “felt borderline miraculous” in 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic. Sharon went on to commission a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which had never received a full revival since its premiere at New York City Opera in 1986. Davis told me he’d taken meetings at the Metropolitan Opera over the years to discuss possible productions, but nothing had ever come of the talks; after the Detroit production was announced, though, “Yuval said the Met called him,” and arranged to bring the production to New York in 2023.

I came early to “Bliss,” then returned again closer to the finish, grabbing a chair near Corey McKern, the baritone playing the philandering Count Almaviva. For the last 11 hours or so, the count had been begging forgiveness from his wife, and now McKern sat slumped on some steps at the edge of the stage. Kjartansson originally staged “Bliss” in 2011, but a decade later, its purgatorial repetition had become a perfect metaphor for our daily lives during the pandemic; the endless loop of penitent toxic maleness also had an amusing new resonance. On a personal level, more than whatever conceptual power the piece held, more than the ways in which repetition deepened and complicated the beauty of Mozart’s music, even more than the athleticism of the singers or the novelty of hearing them, unamplified, from only a few feet away, I was struck by the space itself. I’m a former resident of the city, and Detroit’s ruins were not new to me; to be frank, I’d been skeptical of the decision to stage the performance in the former Michigan Building Theater at all. So I was surprised to find myself tearing up during the final burst of applause at midnight. Had it been the amazing feat of endurance I’d just witnessed? The fact that this was one of the first live musical performances I’d seen in over a year? Or was it because we hadn’t been invited into this space simply to gawk at a memento mori, but rather to transform it into something transcendent, or at least to try?

Mark Williams, the chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, told me that when he heard about Sharon’s move to Detroit, he was not surprised. He and Sharon had worked together at the Cleveland Orchestra, where Sharon directed a pair of acclaimed opera productions. But Sharon’s ambitions, Williams said, were bigger than guest directing; he was “the sort of person who would want to come into a space where he could really effect change, rather than going into a more established space and becoming more of a caretaker. So when he told me about Detroit, I thought, Gosh, that makes perfect sense. I believe that Yuval and Detroit Opera could really become the company that is showing America what opera can be.”

As a deep partisan of the city, I say with all fondness: The future of American opera unfolding in Detroit was not a plot twist I saw coming. And yet, Sharon countered, Detroit might actually be “the perfect place to really push for what the future of opera can be.” He is not interested in a universalist, one-size-fits-all approach, where “La Bohème” ends up the same in Detroit as it does everywhere else: “No, it’s got to be totally of Detroit in the end. That, to me, is the path forward.” Couldn’t — shouldn’t, Sharon insisted — opera in Detroit look and feel and sound like nothing else in the country?

In person, Sharon has the air of a convivial host. Boyish and elfin, with a slight frame and probing blue eyes, he’s a hugger, an easy laugher, a hoarder of both apt quotes by heavyweight European thinkers (Brecht, Barthes, Adorno, Kierkegaard, Peter Sloterdijk) and gossipy anecdotes (e.g. the one about the famous opera diva who phoned her agent in Europe so he could call the driver of her limo and have him lower the air-conditioning) — someone who “knows what he wants but is very polite, the opposite of an authoritarian director,” according to Matthias Schulz, the director of the Berlin State Opera, who sounded, when we talked, at once impressed and slightly puzzled by this approach.

Earlier this year, Schulz invited Sharon to Berlin to revive his production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which he first presented in 2019. “The Magic Flute” is Sharon’s favorite opera, and in his staging the singers are puppets dangling from strings in a children’s theater, with Tamino, the hero, costumed to resemble the manga character Astro Boy. (“The original version had tons of flying,” Sharon says. “We’re cutting that back.”) A few days before that revival opened, I met Sharon in front of Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he arrived on a lime-green rental bicycle. He spent time in the city in the early aughts, when the KW, housed in an abandoned margarine factory, was among his favorite haunts. “I didn’t even check what was on,” he said as we entered, pulling a black N95 mask from the pocket of a sharp coat assembled from expensive-looking shingles of rough-hewed wool. “I always love what they do here.” It turned out that in the first gallery we were greeted by a quartet of stylized marionettes by the Austrian artist Peter Friedl. “Wow,” Sharon said. He pulled out his phone and snapped a photograph. Critics of his “Magic Flute,” he noted, didn’t like the marionette concept. He chuckled. “They thought of it as childish. I think it’s childlike. There’s a distinction!”

The original 2019 production was plagued with difficulties. The flying devices barely worked, and the original conductor, Franz Welser-Möst, dropped out three weeks before the opening for an emergency knee surgery. Audience members booed at the premiere. A zero-star review in The Financial Times began: “There are natural catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. And then there are man-made catastrophes, such as Yuval Sharon’s new production of Die Zauberflöte at Berlin’s Staatsoper.” Sharon has since acknowledged that the opening was “a disaster” — but the production did find its footing, and actually became popular, hence Schulz’s desire for the streamlined revival, which has become part of the Staatsoper’s repertory. “Matthias told me it became a cult favorite,” Sharon said, “which I think is a nice way of saying critics hated it but audiences like it.”

I’d been scheduled to attend a rehearsal two nights earlier, but just before I left my hotel, I received an apologetic email saying one of the cast members felt uncomfortable having a journalist in the house. I would only be allowed to watch an hour of the proceedings from high in a balcony, far from everyone. Later I learned the context of my banishment from Sharon, who arrived in Berlin the day before: After a quick stop at his hotel he headed straight to the opera house, where the first thing he heard, from the same cast member who objected to my presence, was: This production is [expletive]. What are we doing? Sharon recounted the story with good humor, but he was obviously annoyed. “I was like, OK, you go sing your part, and I’ll deal with people who want to be here,” Sharon said. He sighed. “You can’t win ’em all. A big part of being a director is realizing that. And you know, watching it again? I thought, I still like all of this! If you asked me to do ‘The Magic Flute’ today, this is the production I’d do.”

On opening night, I sat next to a girl who couldn’t have been older than 10 and had brought along a pair of opera glasses. The technical and conceptual audacity of Sharon’s productions tend to reap the most attention, but I’ve often come away from his work remembering smaller moments, funny or surreal, that grasp the emotional heart of the operas he’s deconstructing. In the case of “The Magic Flute,” one such moment came near the end, after Tamino rescues Pamina — and then, suddenly, the pair re-emerge in modern dress, the setting having shifted to a pristine replica of a 1960s suburban kitchen, jarringly rerouting the lovers’ fable-like quest narrative into a scene from a David Lynch movie, a version of Ever After both sinister and deflatingly mundane.

The standing ovation the show received would seem to justify Sharon’s self-confidence. But the skeptical cast member’s question gets at a nagging tension that hovers in the background whenever a provocateur like Sharon enters a more tradition-bound establishment — and there are few arts establishments more tradition-bound than opera, an endeavor that, perhaps for this very reason, seems perpetually in crisis. Devotees fret about aging audiences (the average Metropolitan Opera subscriber in the last season before Covid-19 was 65), cultural irrelevance, overdependence on wealthy donors, elitism, lack of diversity and of course the challenges of presenting what’s known as the “inherited repertoire,” which can make major opera houses feel more like museums displaying beautifully lit but familiar versions of beloved masterpieces. According to Marc Scorca, president of Opera America, many opera houses are financially healthy at the moment, thanks to recent federal stimulus packages — but “underneath that,” he says, “is huge concern about how the audience will rematerialize once Covid is behind us.”

Sharon recognizes these challenges as being even more fraught in Detroit, where an already lean budget became leaner during the pandemic — and where, he told me, “the old metrics were, you have a 90-percent-white audience in a city that’s 80 percent Black.” He went on: “They lured me in with the sentiment that said, ‘We absolutely need to change.’ And I said, ‘Well, if change is really what you’re interested in, then, I mean — continuation is not what I’m here to do.’”

The job in Detroit has been a return of sorts for Sharon, who grew up nearby, in Chicago. His parents, both Israeli, came to the United States when his father, Ariel, a nuclear engineer, attended Northwestern University. After Chernobyl, Ariel started a company that made nuclear-plant emergency simulators, a job that kept him on the road — often to Germany, where, “kind of the way American businessmen would go golfing together, clients there would take him to the opera,” Yuval told me. Ariel had always been an amateur music lover, noodling around on the family’s piano and insisting that Yuval (but, for some reason, neither of his siblings) stick with lessons. The pattern repeated itself with opera: As Ariel became more of a buff, his son, who thought the swords and dragons in Wagner were cool, would become his regular companion at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

The first opera Yuval saw, a production of “La Traviata” on a visit to Germany when he was 12 or 13, didn’t speak to him, but he still remembers a single, dreamlike moment from the otherwise traditional staging. In the final act, as Violetta lay dying in bed while a chorus sang offstage — party music, Sharon says, the moment where the woman realizes the world outside doesn’t care — a clown holding a balloon emerged from beneath her bed and sneaked out a window. “It was the only moment in which the reality of what was happening onstage was broken,” he says. The rest of the production rapidly faded, leaving little impression. But the image of the clown stuck in his mind.

By middle school he’d become a self-described “loner kid”; by high school he was watching Bergman’s “Persona” for pleasure. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in literature but hoping to get into film or theater directing. After graduating he moved to Berlin, living in a flat with a coal stove and teaching English part-time. Living in the city was so cheap that he could afford to go out to plays, concerts and operas. Opera had never struck him as the sort of endeavor in which he could play a part; it felt fixed, like going to a museum or reading the Great Books. But in Berlin he saw opera directors with the freedom, thanks in part to state funding, to be wildly experimental, and realized an opera production could be more than a re-creation of something from the past.

Sharon moved to New York in 2002. He helped found an experimental theater company, but he soon realized that all of his shows had musical elements. He was becoming more excited about his day job at New York City Opera, where he would eventually run a new-music program called Vox. Meeting composers and workshopping their operas with the orchestra, he found himself most enthusiastic about the pieces that didn’t feel as if they would make sense framed in a normal theater — those composed specifically for amplified voices, say, or incorporating electronic components. But starting a company to produce new opera seemed impossible in New York, and none of the cramped black-box theaters he could afford to rent felt like exciting visual spaces. In 2008 he began spending time in Los Angeles, working as an assistant director to Achim Freyer, a student of Bertolt Brecht’s and one of the avant-garde directors whose work he found inspiring in Berlin. Sharon says he got the job, working on a monumental staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, because “they needed someone who could speak German and who loved Wagner enough to make a two-year commitment.” Scorca, of Opera America, remembers the transplanted Easterner raving about how Los Angeles had a special freshness, an absence of cynicism and an openness to the arts. The Los Angeles Opera had been around only since 1986; Freyer’s production was to be the first complete “Ring” cycle ever performed in the city. “There was a whole arts infrastructure really being birthed,” Scorca says. “The Broad Museum hadn’t been built yet. Disney Hall was still relatively new. Something very special was happening, and there was a receptivity to the new that Yuval liked.” And unlike New York, Los Angeles had space to accommodate the scale of Sharon’s creative vision.

“We were the new New York,” chuckles Cedric Berry, a bass-baritone who performed in the Industry’s first production, “Crescent City.” Set in a fictional city based on New Orleans after Katrina, the opera, by the Louisiana native Anne LeBaron, had been a favorite of Sharon’s since it was workshopped at Vox, and in some ways became his impetus for starting the Industry. He raised $250,000 from donors and grants and rented a warehouse in the Atwater Village neighborhood. “The music was the hardest piece I’ve ever done,” Berry told me. “But in addition to being an opera, it was an art installation” — Sharon had invited local visual artists to design immersive sets — “so the audience was on the stage, around the stage, you walked through them. My character was building a house. And they had cameras in your face, projecting video onto screens, so you had to be a smart actor, period.”

The dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who was starting the LA Dance Project around the same time, recalls looking at a synopsis of the show “and thinking, This is the sort of thing very unlikely to work.” But by all accounts it did. The staging was high-concept; “I never make things easier, I make them more complicated,” Sharon admitted to me, while Berry says that “if it’s not something anyone in their right mind thinks is impossible, Yuval wouldn’t want to do it.” But Sharon remained laser-focused on performance and traditional technique, rooting out what Berry called “ ‘smacting,’ a kind of mock-acting, what people think of when they think of musical theater.” In a rapturous review, the Los Angeles Times classical-music critic Mark Swed described the Industry as “potentially groundbreaking” for the city. Millepied came away such a convert that the LA Dance Project collaborated with the Industry on its next project, “Invisible Cities.”

For Sharon, Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” makes opera the “ultimate collaborative art form and the ultimate multimedia art form” — even if for Wagner himself the term “meant ‘everything comes from my brain, and it’s all unified.’” Sharon’s own concept for a 21st-century Gesamtkunstwerk is “multivoiced, a polyphony rather than a monotony.” The 2020 Industry production “Sweet Land,” for instance, had two directors, two composers and two librettists. And the polyphony of public space came into play during site-specific Industry productions like “Hopscotch,” injecting some degree of anarchy into the pieces. Berry, who performed the role of Kublai Khan in “Invisible Cities” in street clothes and a wheelchair, told me he was often mistaken by commuters at Union Station for “some random homeless person” who happened to be singing; during one performance, when Berry paused during one of his arias, a woman who had been listening took the opportunity to start belting her own song.

One of the composers for “Sweet Land,” the Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun, told me that Sharon, from the outset of their unorthodox collaboration, encouraged the artists to let their imaginations run wild “as if there were no financial concerns.” Normally, she said, the artistic director of an opera company would be the one raising practical questions: “They’ll say, ‘We can’t do this, and here are a hundred reasons why.’ At the early meetings for ‘Sweet Land,’ that was me. It’s the first time I thought, Wait, am I conservative?”

There’s an element of directing that’s practical, Sharon told me — “basically, managing time. But then you need another level, where you’re tapping into the realm of the impossible, what can barely be imagined. Sing in a moving car! Play violin while crossing a busy street!” In “Hopscotch,” an actor on a motorcycle pulled alongside the limousines in moving traffic to deliver lines sent to the vehicles’ speakers via wireless mics — after which, Sharon said, audience members would “start to wonder what else might be part of the show. A helicopter flew by and they assumed that was us!” Bringing the fictional into the everyday world highlights, for Sharon, the porousness of those boundaries, allowing witnesses to imagine transformative change in what might have seemed like an immutable reality.

The space housing the Detroit Opera celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Originally called the Capitol Theater, it operated as a movie palace and live venue — Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers and Duke Ellington all performed there in its heyday — until 1985, when it was closed and left abandoned and unguarded for four years, with homeless people taking up residence inside and looters carting off one of the crystal chandeliers. When the Michigan Opera Theater purchased the building for $600,000 in 1989, its section of downtown Detroit had become so ruinous that “everybody thought we were really insane,” the company’s charismatic founder, David DiChiera, told The Times in 1999. But DiChiera started the company only four years after the 1967 Detroit riot, when businesses and residents were fleeing to the suburbs, and he’d made sustaining an opera company in a blue-collar town his life’s work. He cannily tapped automakers, among others, for funding, including for the restoration of what became the Detroit Opera House, which reopened in 1996 with a performance featuring Luciano Pavarotti. His programming leaned to the classical, but he also worked to reflect the demographics of the city, becoming an early advocate of colorblind casting (Kathleen Battle made her professional operatic debut at M.O.T.) and helping commission the 2005 premiere of “Margaret Garner,” an opera with a libretto by Toni Morrison based on the true story that inspired her novel “Beloved.”

DiChiera stepped away from the institution in 2017 and died the following year, leaving the company in what the critic Mark Stryker described in The Detroit Free Press as an “artistic holding pattern.” In 2019, Stephen Lord, the principal conductor, resigned following allegations of sexual harassment at other companies. (Lord denied the accusations at the time.) Sharon, meanwhile, was planning to use a portion of his MacArthur grant to take a yearlong sabbatical in Japan; he’d been studying Japanese and had purchased a plane ticket for April 1, 2020. (“I know,” he said, after telling me the date. “It’s funny. It was like, April Fools!”)

Gary Wasserman, a Detroit philanthropist and longtime supporter of the Michigan Opera Theater, had been following Sharon’s career for years; he told me he considered “Hopscotch” one of the most memorable theatrical experiences he’d ever had, comparing its intricacy to a fine watch. He caught a performance of “Sweet Land” before the pandemic, hoping he could lure Sharon to bring it to Michigan. After the pandemic arrived and the possibility of upcoming productions vanished, an M.O.T. board member asked him if Sharon might consider coming on as artistic director. Sharon flew to Detroit in June. He knew that if he accepted the job, he wanted to announce a fall production immediately — but performing inside the theater remained impossible. It was only when Sharon asked about the company’s other assets that he was told about the parking structure across the street.

“Twilight: Gods,” mounted that fall, was Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of the final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle — normally five or six hours, pared by Sharon to a slim 65 minutes or so, with groups of eight cars at a time moving from level to level to watch different scenes unfold while listening to the music via FM radio. It was an unambiguous triumph. “The last part of the Ring cycle is about a world order that’s collapsing, and the need, in a way, for it to collapse,” Sharon told me. Brünnhilde throws fire into her father’s hall “to literally burn it down, with the hope that a future humanity will arise that will be better. It’s, on one hand, pessimistic. On the other hand, I felt like it was what we were living through anyway.” The great dramatic soprano Christine Goerke came onboard to sing Brünnhilde; her steed, appropriately enough, became a Ford Mustang. Sharon and M.O.T.’s chief executive, Wayne Brown, personally greeted each car. Some theatergoers arrived in jeans or sweats, others in evening attire. Brown told me one group of attendees hung a chandelier in their car and brought flutes of Champagne.

One thing that made Sharon’s work at the Industry so exciting was the way in which it seemed to exist in dialogue with the sprawling, messy history of the city around it. It’s still too early to say how Sharon’s vision will intersect with Detroit, but there have been strong hints. He tapped a local writer, Marsha Music, to narrate “Twilight: Gods” and give the story a Detroit voice. The production of “X,” of course, had resonance thanks to Malcolm (a.k.a. Detroit Red) and the Nation of Islam’s Michigan roots. “Blue,” a 2019 opera by the composer Jeanine Tesori and the librettist Tazewell Thompson about police violence, was performed last year at the riverfront Aretha Franklin Amphitheater, which Marsha Music called “historically a Black performance space,” marveling that, at least on the night she attended, “When the people walked up in there, it looked like Ebony Fashion Fair.” The nearly sold-out run of “X” was especially popular; three-quarters of its single-ticket sales were to new audience members, with more than double the usual number coming from Detroit residents.

In April, Sharon directed the company’s first show back in the Detroit Opera House since the start of the pandemic: the inherited-repertoire favorite “La Bohème.” Sharon being Sharon, his version unfolded in reverse order, opening with Act IV, in which Mimì dies, and ending with Act I, in which she and her lover, Rodolfo, first meet. Detroit has died and been reborn so many times that Sharon’s reworking of the classic felt like an oblique nod to the city. Beginning with the sorrow that would befall these young people created a fantastic dramatic tension as the story proceeded, but an odd feeling of hope persisted as the story moved from the end of the affair to its blooming: Tragedy may be inevitable, but the lovers’ time together felt entirely worthwhile.

Not everyone loved the idea. Sharon, when I saw him at the dress rehearsal, was delighted by a write-up on the website of The Daily Mail, the British tabloid, bearing the headline, “Detroit gives tragic classic opera La Bohème a woke reboot: City will stage production in REVERSE order to avoid ending where main character dies so audience leaves feeling ‘hopeful and optimistic.’” He began reciting various angry comments to me (“Excellent idea by the woke left”), cackling so loudly that a tech guy preparing to film the rehearsal shushed us. Taking a seat in the mostly empty house, Sharon leaned back to watch the run-through while an assistant director typed his murmured notes into a laptop: His beard looks too trim, make it messier. A couple of words in this supertitle are wrong. Move that stool out of the shadow or it’ll be too dark. And, when one of the characters stood in a particular position with his arm raised: Oh, no — that looks like the poster from “Hamilton!”

At the gala opening two days later, a string quartet played songs by Taylor Swift and Daft Punk. The opera itself flew by, per Sharon’s design: “I wanted it to feel like Japanese calligraphy, where you can’t remove your brush from the page,” he said in a talk before the show. “That’s what I’d like this production to feel like: one brush stroke, quick. Like being young.” The minimalist set, by John Conklin, allowed Sharon to eliminate intermissions, which are usually necessary for scene changes, and the relative simplicity of the staging gave him time to focus on the performers, who now had to be prepared to sing the most difficult arias at the end of the evening; Edward Parks and Brandie Inez Sutton, playing the comic-relief lovebirds Marcello and Musetta, stole the show.

“The challenge, when we do ‘La Bohème’ and more standard repertoire,” Sharon told me last fall, “will be, how do we bring an improvisatory spirit into something that feels more fixed?” — a spirit closer to that of “Bliss,” wherein the discipline required of the performers also came with enormous freedom. “For me, that’s one of the big experiments of coming into an environment like an opera house, and why ‘La Bohème,’ for me, is one of my biggest experiments.” Not merely doing it backward, he went on, but trying to figure out how to make an opera written in the 19th century feel as if it were being invented right there on the spot. “That discovery, in each and every repetition,” Sharon said. “That’s what you want to try and find a way to capture.” As his production neared its finish (technically the start), even throwaway lines accrued unexpected weight, landing sudden, sharp blows. In the conclusion of Act I, Mimì agrees to join Rodolfo at the Café Momus: “E al ritorno?” he asks. And when we come back? “Curioso,” she replies. Let’s see.

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote a feature about a biker shootout in Waco, Texas.