Vienna.(Romeo et Juliette)

Once very popular, Gounod's Romeo et Juliette had not been seen at the Staatsoper for more than eighty years until December 22, when Jurgen Flimm's new production was unveiled (seen Dec. 30). Birgit Hutter's costumes were modern yet belonged to no specific period or style; they served up plenty of fantasy and color for the ball scene, but few of the usual cliches were on view. Juliet was given the most variety, Madonna-style, from jeans, white mantle and a microphone at her entrance, to a very sexy, short-skirted green number. For most of the evening, she wore a skimpy, tight-bodiced white undergarment. Flimm's direction, too, was more intent on telling the story with a minimum of extraneous business, and most of the time he succeeded. There was more public kissing and cuddling than in most productions of this opera (and many others), but modern teenagers are not always very reserved. The great innovation for Vienna was the lack of any scenery, this being replaced by Patrick Woodruffe's five huge mobile lighting towers and batteries of spotlights. This was Woodruffe's first opera; he has worked mainly with pop bands, and much of the time his ideas were effective. In some scenes, however, the lighting changes were too frequent or ...