The answer came to writer and director Mary Zimmerman while showering.
“I suddenly thought — a teeny-tiny, itty-bitty adaptation of The Magic Flute,” she recalled, discussing how she conjured up a production for the small stage at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. The Matchbox Magic Flute premiered there earlier this year and is now set for a run in the San Francisco Bay Area, Oct. 18 – Dec. 8, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
“What drew me to [the opera] is the beautiful music [and] the fantastical plot, which is very much up my alley. I’ve spent most of my time in theater doing epic and old-time stories with dragons, adventures, and magical worlds. It wasn’t as if I had to think, ‘What opera could I put into this [theater] space?’ The Magic Flute was [actually] done originally in a place that was more like a theater than an opera house and performed by a theater troupe.”
The Chicago production took place in the Goodman’s diminutive 400-seat Owen Theatre, and with Berkely Rep staging its performances in the similarly scaled Roda Theatre, Bay Area audiences will be able marvel at Zimmerman’s jewel-box-like adaptation of Mozart’s iconic opera. Using only 10 singers and a five-member “orchestra,” The Matchbox Magic Flute tells the tale of the young prince Tamino, charged with completing a list of ritualistic tasks to win the hand of Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night — aided throughout his quest by the bird-catcher Papageno.
In addition to Zimmerman, the creative team for the production includes Amanda Dehnert (music direction), Todd Rosenthal (scenic design), Ana Kuzmanić (costume design), T.J. Gerckens (lighting design), and André Pluess (sound design). The cast features many of the same actors and singers who performed in the Chicago premiere.
Zimmerman has directed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and at La Scala in Milan, among other houses, and her many honors and awards include a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship. She is currently a professor of performance studies at Northwestern University. In conversation with SF Classical Voice about The Matchbox Magic Flute, Zimmerman offered insights into her process and the sources that feed her imagination.
Your Magic Flute has a libretto you wrote. What were the challenges unique to adapting this particular opera?
The first act proceeds logically, but the second act is far more challenging. It’s often rearranged — even in traditional versions actually. I directed a “real” Magic Flute a long time ago [in 1996] and don’t think of it often because it was with a rental set and costumes. I was really just staging it. Even that had a second act that was rearranged.
What in the second act begs for rearrangement?
The second act, even the most ardent lover of the opera might agree, loses its momentum dramaturgically. You don’t know where you are. There’s a set of trials or tasks that could be streamlined. I wondered if I could lighten the burden of it.
Tamino’s arc is just not logical. It doesn’t make sense or line up. The trials start and stop, and are they at the temple? How are the three ladies there? Are they outside or inside? Some audience members disconnect because it feels like [the show is] lagging, not moving forward.
What I’ve done with this version is there are no priests or brotherhood of men. There’s a benevolent ruler but not the religious element, which does mean some very beautiful music is lost. The chorus beginning Act 2 is not there, but great [dramatic] clarity is gained. I’m also careful to outline that there are three trials and here’s what border they are in. It’s much clearer where we are.
I will say, in the first act, there is also one illogical strangeness involving Tamino and Papageno and a task they’re assigned. They set out together, but Papageno finds his way to arrive alone in Pamina’s bedchamber. There’s no explanation of how [he and Tamino] got separated. It’s the oddest thing.
Of course, The Magic Flute’s a masterpiece, so you just don’t care. But breaks in logic do impact audiences’ ability to engage.
Why lighten the burden? Why not leave the audience to untangle the masterwork?
My little version doesn’t touch the huge traditional version. Mine is a hybrid. We only have five instruments, so by necessity it’s already radically changed. With only 10 singers, I can’t lean into the grandeur. I have to lean into the charm, the tunes, the narrative. There’s still dancing, singing, and unbelievably elaborate costumes and a detailed painted set. [But] we just don’t have the scale. I love taking a huge thing and compressing it into a small space. I wanted it to remain overwhelmingly abundant for the audience.
Are illogical plotlines unique to opera, or are they commonly found in musical theater generally?
I’ve made musicals, and I know how it goes. I think the second-act problems come from having this certain aria you love, [so] you just jam it in. The Music Man is notorious this way — its timelines make no sense. It’s the longest day of the year, the library’s open, and it’s the Fourth of July. [The female lead] sings goodnight to the evening star and then goes to work at the library. But it’s because you write a song, you love it, then you rework the plot, and it no longer fits in. [So] you just put it in and never get around to fixing the libretto. Many phenomenal works of art have this [problem].
What was your process for adapting The Magic Flute like?
For all my work — The Magic Flute was partly this way — I don’t write a script until I’m in rehearsal. They [begin as] adaptations with a baseline story I’m working from, but the actual way gets manifested onstage. I write every night before [the next day’s] rehearsal. In this case, because of the complexity of adapting the libretto — [music means] it’s metered, has to have the important note on the important word, has to rhyme — I knew this was a much more difficult writing task. So I did do the entire first act before we started rehearsal.
And the second act?
I was a little bit ahead of them, but I was working it out during rehearsals.
Let’s talk about working with Amanda Dehnert and André Pluess, who adapted the score. Can you describe your process and the areas in which you depend on or depart from each other?
Amanda and Andre are musically so sophisticated. I am not at that level, and I would offer my layperson’s perception. Like, “I think that might be going on too long,” or, “Don’t cut that. It’s so pretty.” We’d hash that out, and mostly I bowed to them. Amanda and André might think a passage didn’t have a lot of purpose. They’d be looking for cuts. I’d say, “No, I have an idea for staging that. It’s going to be vital. It might sound like a repeat, but I’m going to do something visually different.” We never had more than an hour’s disagreement.
There is no choreographer credited. What shaped the movement and blocking approach?
I did want a choreographer, but this was an expensive production. Done in a small house with a [small] cast, that [would have been] huge. I thought, “I’ll just do it myself.” I can’t count steps, but I had ideas. The cast [also] has an infinity of experience in song and dance. The day we choreographed was one of the funniest days. We laughed and laughed.
Tell me the ways theater first attracted you or was the catalyst for your curiosity.
My mother was an absolute devotee of the arts. My parents were both professors and on leave doing research, so I grew up mostly in Lincoln, Nebraska, but also Paris and London. I’ve told these stories many times, but my mother took us to a Christmas pantomime in London, with ugly stepsisters going to a ball. One of them had a gown that lit up with Christmas lights. It was so galvanizing to me. [My mother] took us to Cyrano de Bergerac in Hyde Park. Supposedly, I cried at the end because it was over. It was long, and I was probably just tired.
[In England], we lived on the border of a woods called the Little Woods. I played in it every day after school, and I came across a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a little clearing. The scene being rehearsed goes on and on, and at one point. Oberon, the king who’s walking round and round, stopped and asked, “How many times do I go around?” The adults all laughed, breaking the spell. I understood they weren’t fairies, but seeing adults play, laugh, and work together like that? I was wildly attracted to it.
What sustains your fascination?
I still feel that same way. Our rehearsal rooms are an elaborate display of play but also sophisticated. We’re figuring out precisely what we have to do so the audience has the same experience of playfulness, love, wisdom, beauty, and thought. I’ve spent my life adapting texts that I loved in childhood. I want to make them manifest, to live in them in three dimensions. It’s a beautiful, ordered world where choices you make can have predictable consequences and still something wild is going on.
I think of theater people as children playing outdoors who won’t come in from the dark. We want to stay in imagination and pretend. Theater also is a magic trick, the constant trying to solve the mystery of structure. Why do you get the laugh here and not there? What can I say to this actor to help them do what I think is right? It’s problems, problems, problems, but the most entertaining problems you can encounter.
Where do you place the value of imagination in the lives of people today?
I think the ability to tolerate boredom is important because that is where you start growing. It’s when I’ve started inventing. So many ideas have come to me when I was walking or riding the bus or train with my head against the window. When you’re not having your imagination — I’m going to use this word deliberately — colonized by a screen with completely fabricated images, your head starts to fill up with its own images. Reading text, you supply the images yourself. The images are conjured or suggested by the words. The ability to be quiet, [with] stretches of nothing happening, allows imagination to occur. Dreamy unspooling space in the head needs time to happen. Whenever I was preparing for an opera at the Met, I [would] listen to it on a loop while walking in the Maine woods, freeing my imagination.
Is there another opera that you would consider adapting or directing next?
As far as adapting, no. The Magic Flute already contains all these scenes, so it’s sort of set up like a prototypical musical to begin with. There aren’t a lot of operas like The Magic Flute that would slide into tiny hybrid adaptations.
In terms of directing an opera, I’ve never gotten to do a Verdi opera. He’s highly theatrical. The plots all make sense. He’s dramaturgically sound. I’d do it in an opera house. Opera is just so challenging. You get beautiful scores but dramas that don’t always make sense. Working at the Met is one of the most difficult things to do in the arts. I’ve had great experiences there, but it’s taken me 20 years to find joy there. [During] one preview of The Matchbox Magic Flute, I got weepy and had the thought that had I not had all that challenge at the Met, I would never have been able to take on this masterpiece.
