Opera Colorado Ovation David Gately's Barber of Seville
In the world of opera, chances are you’ve felt David Gately’s presence. He doesn’t possess a booming baritone or melodic tenor’s voice, nor does he wave a baton. He’s more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, an interpreter of sorts for musicians, librettists, poets, and singers. He didn’t ask for this job, it just fell into his very capable hands more than thirty years ago. And, over that time he has directed almost all the classics in operatic repertoire – the Puccinis, Verdis, and Mozarts, to name a few – as well as musical theatre and contemporary works.
We caught up with David before the opening of his thirtieth production of the Barber of Seville in Winnipeg to ask just how he has become one of the most highly sought after stage directors in opera.
OC: Is there a “David Gately” style?
DG: I don’t think that I have a style. What I really try to do is serve the piece that I’m doing. I delve deeply into the work before I start. I listen to the music, study the text, and then I do what comes from my brain. My impulses are different for every piece – we are all products of everything we experience – I am responding at a gut level and not try to impose one set of thoughts on everything I do. Actually, I don’t think you can decide your own style; it’s something other people talk about. An interesting example of that happened last year after the Fort Worth festival where I did the very serious Dead Man Walking and the comedy La Ceneretola. One critic wrote that it was hard to tell that one person directed both pieces. I took that as a compliment.
OC: So, do you try to stay faithful to the creators’ intentions? 
DF: It’s hard to direct something that isn’t there, and it’s very hard to impose an idea onto a piece if in fact that isn’t in the piece. You may want it to say something really badly but if it’s not in the music and not in the text you can’t make it say that. So, I think it’s difficult to go against the composer’s intent. Interestingly, I’m working on new piece, Before Night Falls by Jorge Martin. It’s a story about Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban poet and writer and his friend who in real life was a very, very strange fellow, was in a psych ward every other month or so, a really strange fellow, but Arenas’ best friend. In the opera you don’t really get any of that information; he performs a whole different function. So even thought he is drawn on a real life character, for me to make him that crazy wouldn’t really work because it’s not supported by the text and the music. That isn’t right or wrong, but when you are doing a piece like this it is different than a biography.
OC: What are your thoughts on updated operas versus traditional productions? And, specifically, how would you compare your direction of Don Pasquale where you moved the opera to the Wild West with Rossini’s Barber of Seville that you’ve kept traditional.
DG: For me the Pasquale wasn’t so much an update as a relocation because it’s set only about thirty years more in the future than it was normally set – it was originally set in the 1830’s and I set it in the 1870’s. What I did was put it in a whole new location. I’m not a director who likes updates very much because it’s difficult for me to watch, for example, Shakespeare and see people in modern dress because people who dress like that don’t also talk like that. It’s not a judgment; it’s just that my brain doesn’t wrap itself around that. Barber, I think, because of its story and the characters and the commedia dell'arte, it is very difficult to update and make modern. It would come off more silly; it’s almost more believable when you think this happened long ago and far away instead of that it happened around the block in New York. I really don’t have anything against updating. I like to go see something and think that was really interesting and have a response to it.
OC: The Barber of Seville is such a light, romantic opera with wonderfully recognizable music. Do you have to walk the line between the seriousness of opera music and the goofiness of the libretto?
DG: The thing about Rossini is that he is all about rhythm and timing – it’s all in the music. One can tell when Rossini thinks something is funny by the way he decorates the music. I think Rossini was writing a romp and that Barber is a very light-hearted funny evening. I don’t think the music is serious: I think it is light-hearted and bubbly and champagne-like when you listen to it, it’s just all fun and bubbles. That’s what I respond to: the music is funny, the turns that Rossini takes, there is very little serious music in the Barber of Seville. And it is terribly recognizable for an audience so that’s part of the fun for them. They might not know all the tunes until they get there but immediately the overture, when it starts, the first part is slow then suddenly it hits the tune and there’s a murmur across the audience and people realize they know it, they heard it in a shaving commercial or something. Then they all know “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro.” And if they are of an age they all know the Bugs Bunny cartoons, so they do know the music to this opera. It’s like going to an old Frank Sinatra concert and he hits a tune and everyone applauds.
OC: When directing the first act of Barber, which culminates into a frenetic finale, you put the whole thing in slow motion. One reviewer wrote that it was “an almost literal evocation of Rossini's "Fredda ed immobile"...it fits elegantly into the director's overall scheme of suggesting alternative perspectives on the opera's accelerating absurdities.” Would you explain how you achieve this?
DG: The finale to act one is this great masterpiece of comedy that builds slowly on stage. It starts with two characters then another one comes on, then another one and another. Then the entire chorus comes on and it keeps building so the comedy gets bigger and bigger. At the very end of that is about an eight minute section of music where the true action stops and the words are simply “there’s a clanging in my head” and “my head’s about to burst.” One gets the sense that all hell was breaking loose in the household but directorially it’s very hard to create eight minutes of chaos happening on stage; it would be endless choreography and dizzying for an audience. I don’t know where the impulse came from but I thought maybe we could create the image of chaos in slow motion then you don’t have to do or tell nearly as much story because you are extending action over a period of time. When you have that many people on stage and that many stories going on it can be incredibly comic. In the production it’s not just people walking around slowly, it’s the culmination of the comedy up to that point. There’s a lot that happened in the whole first act that reaches a peak in the slow motion scene. So it’s continued telling but an effect that helps create chaos when in fact it’s very carefully planned and thought out.
OC: What do you tell people to watch for during this scene and throughout the opera?
DG: Rosina in her aria “Una voche poco fa” she expresses her love in the first half for Lindoro and in the second half explores the fact that she is locked up in this house by her guardian Dr. Bartolo and can’t get out. Her only revenge is to set one hundred traps for him. Usually in a production she just says that but in my production I have her actually set up four traps as she sings that aria. Then in the following action Bartolo proceeds to fall for each of those actions. He falls for three of them right away but doesn’t fall for the fourth for quite some time. The last one actually pays off about fifteen minutes later. It’s fun and if the audience is paying attention they get all that.
OC: Do you have a favorite moment in this opera?
DG: I’ve heard Barber a thousand times. It’s hard work every time. It is three hours of business. You can’t phone it in, it’s always complicated. For me, when I sit in the audience and watch them react, that’s what it’s about. I don’t want to feel like I’m pandering to the audience. I want to challenge them to listen and pay attention. I try to do what’s in the piece and hope the audience gets it. I’m not there to get laughs, although I love laughs. So, I don’t really have a favorite moment after hearing it this many times but I do enjoy listening to an audience respond to what’s happening on stage and seeing what bits of characterization are understood; that’s where I get the most enjoyment.
OC: The Opera Colorado performance is your thirtieth production of the Barber…
DG: Thirty-first, actually, when I get to Denver.
OC: So that means you’ve worked on Barber for more than thirty years and have fine tuned it over that time. The last time we talked you mentioned the comedienne Sarah Silverman in reference to working on something over a number of years.
DG: Yes, I was reading this interview of three or four comedians, and she was saying that with a comic routine you hone it over a long period of time; you don’t just have it the first day. You go out and do it in front of an audience and find out how they respond, and you fine tune it and tell a joke a little differently and it gets honed over a period of time. She was bemoaning the fact that with the advent of YouTube her act gets frozen in time and then it loses its ability to evolve because that’s what people come to know as the routine. For me that has great resonance because with the Barber I’ve honed it over time. If you saw the first one I did at the Lake George Opera Festival in 1977 and then you saw last night’s performance in Winnipeg you would see great similarities because much of it has not changed at all. Yet some of it has because I’ve worked with so many artists who have brought their ideas to me and some of that has stuck with me in my production.
OC: Comedic timing it something that doesn’t come easily and when it’s forced everyone knows it. How do you pull comedy out of opera singers?
DG: Not to be too general about things but if I have someone who is having a hard time with a comic moment I can break it down for them rhythmically. Then they can understand what helps get the laugh. But you know we have great comedians in this cast. Isabelle Leonard is charming, witty, funny, she’s a terrific comedienne and actress. Kevin Glavin is a walking cartoon in real life. I think that if you’re going to do a comic opera – and opera is a producer’s medium – if you want it to be funny you have to cast funny people.
OC: Do you have a pretty good sense of humor?
DG: I do. I don’t think I am a particularly funny person but I do understand comedy, I understand what’s funny about a piece, and I understand how to tell the story in a way that is comic. So, yes there is something innately funny about me. I always liked comedies, I Love Lucy, even Jerry Lewis movies, and the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road” movies, I used to watch that when I was really young. I was always drawn to comedy. I could never do standup; I don’t think I have that kind of wit. But I could direct standup.
OC: What brought you to stage direction as a career?
DG: I always say that it was an accident; opera chose me, I didn’t chose opera. I was a theatre major at Oberlin College in Ohio. I was mostly acting but I had a couple of opportunities to direct at Oberlin. It was kind of a Cinderella story because an opera director saw one of my productions of the Mikado then asked me to assist him at Lake George first then New York City opera then Houston Grand Opera where I ended up staying for four years. That was totally accidental because I never would have pursued a career in opera. That’s where it started, and I trained myself on-the-hoof, I assisted a lot of people and learned to do what I do.
OC: Because of your background in acting, do you think you bring a different perspective to opera?
DG: I hope so. Of course I’ve been in opera for thirty plus years so I know about the traditions and how operas are done. But I wasn’t afraid of the medium of opera because I’d done operetta and musical comedy so I understood about singing the text. I had to learn language and repertoire but I always came about it from an actor’s perspective first and just said, Okay, what’s going on with these people? I then would just delve into the characters.
OC: Is there an opera that you have yet to work on but hope to?
DG: If I really want to get my teeth into something, I like doing more contemporary work. I’ve done, over the last few years, more contemporary work at the Fort Worth Opera Festival. This year I’ll be doing the new world premier by Jorge Martin’s Before Night Falls. I enjoy doing more contemporary works because the libretti are usually better than the classic operas where you’re constantly trying to make up for holes in the libretto; they are usually more thought out as dramatic pieces and tackle more meaty subjects. That’s what I enjoy doing the most at this point.
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