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Stephen Wadsworth |
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STEPHEN WADSWORTH is a stage director and writer who divides his time between opera and spoken theater. In 2004 he directed Wagner's Lohengrin at Seattle Opera, Molière's Don Juan at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, Handel's Xerxes for New York City Opera, and an adaptation of Schnitzler, Fräulein Else (written by his wife, the actress Francesca Faridany), at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. In the 2004-5 season he directed Handel's Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at Seattle Opera. Also in 2005 he directed his new translation of the Molière Don Juan at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C., and started to work on a new play commission from Seattle Repertory Theatre. He was decorated by the French government with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in the 2004 honors list. Mr. Wadsworth is an acknowledged and influential master of classical style who has concentrated on works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably the plays of Molière, Marivaux and Goldoni, and the operas of Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart. Mr. Wadsworth has translated as well as directed works by all these writers and composers. His landmark translations and productions of Marivaux's plays, which originated at the McCarter Theatre and have traveled widely, introduced the playwright into the repertoire of the American theater. They were published in 1999 by Smith and Kraus as Marivaux: Three Plays. His recent reconstruction of Molière's Don Juan has excited new interest in this seminal text on both sides of the Atlantic. His reimagining of this much censored and bowdlerized work has helped solve one of the great mysteries of French literature. It was for his brilliant scholarship and elegant translations of texts long considered untranslatable by the French that Mr. Wadsworth was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government this year. Stephen Wadsworth was also instrumental in the Handel revival in this country with his stagings, in the 1980s, of Xerxes, Alcina and Partenope, all three of which he translated and directed, the latter in its U.S. premiere. His bravura 1993 production of Xerxes for Santa Fe Opera has been seen since then in Boston, Seattle, Toronto, Los Angeles and twice at New York City Opera, in 1997 and 2004. The Wall Street Journal called it "probably one of the most compelling operatic and theatrical experiences to be had anywhere." Mr. Wadsworth has also gained considerable recognition as an interpreter of Wagner with a seven-opera Wagner cycle at the Seattle Opera, including Der Fliegende Holländer (1989), Lohengrin (1994, 2004) and Der Ring des Nibelungen (2000, 2001, 2005). His Ring, with designs by his regular collaborators, set designer Thomas Lynch, costumer Martin Pakledinaz and lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski, is the first major Ring to merge a non-revisionist visual presentation with aggressive Personenregie. The production was lauded for the vivid, fearless clarity of its story-telling, its series of complex, palpable relationships, and a sense of intimacy referred to in the press as "dangerously acute," "unforgettably moving," and "transformative of characters and viewers alike." The Wadsworth Ring plays again in 2005. In 2001 Mr Wadsworth directed Aeschylus' Oresteia plays as well as Wagner's Ring. Intrigued by Wagner's absorption of Aeschylus, Mr. Wadsworth brought about a new production of the Oresteia to open the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's new Roda Theatre. He co-directed the plays with Tony Taccone and, in collaboration with Robert Fagles, made an adaptation of Mr. Fagles award-winning translations for the occasion. This interdisciplinary questing is typical of Mr. Wadsworth's work, which is inspired and informed by a wide-ranging exploration of other art forms and of the relationship between aesthetics and history. Similarly, he is a master craftsman who blends all elements of theatrical craft into seamless, integrated productions of operas and plays. Mr. Wadsworth has directed opera at La Scala, Vienna State Opera, Covent Garden, Netherlands Opera, Scottish Opera, Canadian Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, the festivals of Santa Fe and Edinburgh, and Seattle Opera, where his close working relationship with Speight Jenkins has yielded, over twenty years, memorable stagings of Janácek's Jenufa, Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice, the seven Wagner operas, and Xerxes. He directed the world premieres of Daron Hagen's Shining Brow, about Frank Lloyd Wright, for Madison Opera in 1993, and Peter Lieberson's Ashoka's Dream for Santa Fe Opera in 1997, and, with Leonard Bernstein, he wrote the opera A Quiet Place. Highlights of his operatic work include the Seattle Orphée (1988), on which he collaborated with Mark Morris. In this production, the first on which he worked with the Lynch-Pakledinaz-Kaczorowski design team, Wadsworth ingeniously blurred the lines between the actions of chorus, dancers and principal characters (the great challenge of Gluckian theater) by mixing them into a group all of whom danced and acted—in such a way that it was impossible to tell which actors were dancers, which chorus, and which principals. "Inspired productions touch the heart of a listener's being," wrote The New Yorker, "reveal music's power to sound every string of a psyche; make the theater what it should be, a place of, at once, ecstasy, entertainment, and moral and political enlightenment. The Seattle Orphée was such a production. It made the absurd extravagances of opera, all that it costs in public and private money and personal, hardworking devotion, seem worthwhile." Wadsworth's staging of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (Houston, Toronto, Edinburgh 1991, New York 2000), on which he worked with another of his regular collaborators, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, brought the harrowing moral rigor and tragic intimacies of this work fully to life. "Under Wadsworth's direction, the profound moral drama of La clemenza di Tito is given weight, cueing us toward the libretto's subtle ethical dialectic," wrote The Globe and Mail (Toronto), "and this moral scheme is enacted through a passionate, vehement exploration of the psychological states implicit in Mozart's music. Wadsworth shows his artistry in groupings that are always charged with meaning, and in a plan of simultaneous actions which shows the worlds of individual obsession intertwining with consequences in a larger society." From 1980-1984 Stephen Wadsworth co-authored the opera A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein. The opera was premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1983 and, after a famously negative reception, significantly revised for 1984 performances at La Scala and the Kennedy Center. A new production at the Vienna State Opera (1986), directed by Mr. Wadsworth and conducted by the composer, was recorded by Deutsche Grammophon and televised by Austrian Television. The opera was warmly received in Europe. Corriere della Sera (Milan) wrote, "The prize of the evening goes to librettist-director Wadsworth, brilliantly talented child of the American dream who knew how to create on paper and onstage the angry portraits of four lost and rediscovered souls. His production is made of images reduced to their essences, and his company exhibited amazing bravura as actors." As with his opera work, Mr. Wadsworth has developed close relationships with several producers in the spoken theater, notably Emily Mann at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where his productions of the Marivaux plays, Goldoni's Mirandolina and Coward's Private Lives originated; and Sharon Ott of the Berkeley Rep and Seattle Rep who first presented his productions of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Molière’s Don Juan and Coward's Design for Living. He is an Associate Artist at Seattle Rep, where he was also for several seasons a TCG/PEW Artist in Residence. Of his first production for the spoken theater, Marivaux's The Triumph of Love, The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Wadsworth’s haunting stage pictures, of melancholy, of elation, and his heart-stopping silences are suffused with consummate grace and lyricism. With this luminous production, the McCarter imparts to the very concept of regional theater a renewed purity of purpose." Mr. Wadsworth staged the world premieres of Beth Henley's Impossible Marriage for the Roundabout in New York, and Francesca Faridany's Fräulein Else at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and his work has also been seen at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Long Wharf in New Haven, the Huntington in Boston, and the Dallas Theatre Center. Almost all of Mr. Wadsworth's productions have traveled to two or more theaters. In the last six years all but the Seattle Ring have played three or more venues. During the 1980s, as an artistic director, with Francesca Zambello, of Milwaukee's Skylight Opera Theatre, Mr. Wadsworth developed famous productions of Monteverdi's three surviving operas which he presented as a cycle in 1988 to great acclaim. He and Ms. Zambello brought international attention to the Skylight with thrilling ensemble-style productions of works by Argento, Bernstein, Blitzstein, Britten, Cesti, Foss, Handel, Janácek, Mozart and Weill, as well as new material by Ricky Ian Gordon, Stephen Oliver, and others. Also during the 1980s Mr. Wadsworth emerged as an important teacher of acting to singers. He taught at the newly formed Young Artist Development Program (now the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program) at the Metropolitan Opera from 1982 through most of its first twenty years, working closely with such singers as Dawn Upshaw, Christine Goerke, Sondra Radvanovsky, Stephanie Blythe, Michelle De Young, Alexandra DeShorties, Chris Pedro Trakas and Christopher Schaldenbrand. He was on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music from 1990-1992 and taught in the young artist programs at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Canadian Opera Company. He is a frequent adjudicator of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has taught masterclasses at universities and conservatories all over the country. Mr. Wadsworth began his career as a journalist in the 1970s. He was Assistant Editor, then Managing Editor of Opera News, and Contributing Editor of Saturday Review. His work was also published in The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Opera, and many other magazines and journals here and abroad.
Bio as of November, 2008.
Working in the Theatre (video)
Arias to Showstoppers: The Worlds of Opera and Theatre - November, 2008
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