ARIA SERIOUS?

The second part of a series looking at what it takes to put on an opera on the stage by San Diego Director of Production, Ron Allen. You can read the first part here . Up above is a design sketch from Act II of Don Quixote. *** There are some advantages to a rented production. You know what you are getting; most of the technical problems have been worked out and it is much cheaper than building new. A rented production will cost $40,000 - $80,000 for sets and costumes. A new production usually cost a minimum of $300,000 and often cost as much as $1 million or more. (Ian has often complained he could build a house for that amount of money. I explain, yes, he could but a house doesn’t have to be engineered and built to take down and put in the back of trucks afterwards or to rotate or change into another house in 20 minutes.) The biggest issues with a rental production are – the set is someone else’s vision and not the companies and how will it look in our theatre. We can usually find a...

Ron Allen is our Director of Production. Ron is a busy man and rightly so -- he's in charge of everything you see on our stage as well as everything that you don't. There's a lot of activity behind the stage, under the stage and above the stage, too, more than most people realize. Making small talk with Ron one morning, I suggested he should blog about what it takes to put an opera together since we are creating a new production of Don Quixote (that's a sketch up above from Act I). Apparently people take me seriously and Ron has put together a wonderful look at what it takes to make an opera happen. There's more to it than any of us can imagine so we've decided to make a series about this topic. So without further ado, here's Part One of Fifteen Million of "Putting An Opera Together." *** Edward asked that I write about how long it takes to put an Opera together and to keep it short... What!? When I consider the hundreds of decisions that have to b...