Design for Singing.(Brief Article)

"The singer is the most important thing in opera," says set and costume designer Michael Yeargan, who created the stunning look of director Elijah Moshinsky's Met Ariadne auf Naxos. "As productions get more advanced and complicated, I sometimes find myself wondering, what is all this stuff that got on the stage? It makes me yearn for the days when you had a singer standing in front of a wrinkly drop. You didn't even care -- you cared about them and what they were singing. Sometimes we [designers] can go a little crazy, and it all gets to be a bit too much."

The Dallas-born and -raised Yeargan grew up seeing singers such as Richard Tucker, Renata Tebaldi and Robert Merrill in the Met's touring productions of the 1950s and '60s and never saw a straight play until he was in high school. His designs, which seem to pierce the essence of each work, have been seen everywhere, from the Met (Otello, Cosi Fan Tutte, Susannah, The Great Gatsby) to New York City Opera (Tosca, Madama Butterfly) to London's West End (Cyrano de Bergerac, Beckett and the new musical Napoleon). His Met Ariadne takes a dazzling, ...