Sher’s Rigoletto was less than rapturously received at its house of origin, the Berlin Staatsoper. In an interview, he put much of the blame on the unavailability of a turntable, upon which Yeargan’s design had relied. Indeed, I don’t see how this show could have played without it—but then, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment, I don’t think it should have been there in the first place. In my Roméo piece, I described the operatic Sher as “a highly Broadway-ized faux-realist,” doing his best to bend the structures (scenic and musical) of 19th-Century opera to “his native understanding.” That still seems accurate to me. But, as we learn from a feature article by Gavin Plumley in the Met’s January program, to it we must add an element that Sher himself cites as recently influential: his experience working in the film medium, adapting J. T. Rogers’ play Oslo for HBO over the summer of 2020. Since that experience postdates this production’s Berlin run, he must be speaking of two things that particularly affected the Met version— the uses of the revolve in assisting “cinematic flow,” and further tweaking of the physical acting  toward the sort that would pass inspection by the camera eye. To quote Plumley’s article: ” ‘Suddenly, you’re in a dark street and Rigoletto’s face in his role as the jester drops, and you see the other parts of who he is as a human being,’ Sher says, explaining that such small, understated touches can have great significance.” Yes. In film, or in a small theatre, they can.

Before returning in a moment to “cinematic flow” and the “small, understated touches,” I must raise the pesky question of the updating and displacement of the opera’s action, which is where my “line drawn on principle” is located with this faux-realist production. What all such displacements require of us at a fundamental level (for among creators’ prerogatives, what could be more fundamental than specification of time and place?) is not a “willing suspension of disbelief,” but its reverse—a suspension of belief. They require us to not care about the integrity of the artwork we’re seeing and hearing, or about our engagement with or detachment from it. And among possible choices of time-and-place revision for this iconic mid-Ottocento opera, Sher could not have chosen a worse one: Germany in the years of the Weimar Republic. Usually, the purpose of such a revision is to bring the work into the audience’s presumed field of easy cultural references—to make it instantly identifiable.^(I) Evidently that is what Sher thought he was doing. But for receptors who do have a cultural frame of reference (artistic, musical, theatrical) to the Weimar era—Grosz,^(II) Schiele, and Dix; Brecht and Weill vs. Reinhardt and Roller; Krolloper Modernismus, etc., etc., or, to broaden the demographic, Cabaret—the tone is impossibly inappropriate. That tone is bitter, sardonic, parodic, defeated but defiant, and pointedly, in-your-face anti-Romantic—all the things Verdi’s music is not. And for the audience members who have little or no point of contact with the Weimar-era culture, the change serves no purpose whatever.