The Tales of Hoffman (dress rehearsal), San Francisco Opera, June 2 2013

So, after a (planned) hiatus of several months, San Francisco Opera is gearing up for the summer season with a new production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman. The most recent production was in 1996, when the company was performing in the Civic Auditorium with sets specifically designed for that venue. The production prior to that was in 1987.

The sets in this new production did not run the risk of eliciting applause from the audience as the curtain went up. In the prologue in the tavern, we saw not much more than a set of blue-gray walls: two walls facing the audience to the left and right, and two more blue-gray walls receding toward upstage. The center of upstage was blacked out; the chorus gradually appeared there as the lights were turned up.

The blue-gray wall theme continued throughout the opera. For Act 1, with Olympia the mechanical doll, the walls were supplemented with triangulated scaffolding to hold them up. Olympia sat upstage, at the end of a counterweighted boom, which two operators manipulated to send her bouncing high into the air. After her aria, Olympia, the boom, and the operators came out onto the main stage to be presented to the various guests.

In Act 2, with Antonia, the blue-gray walls were augmented with staircases attached to them, the staircases simply jutting out from the walls with no support beneath them.  In Act 3, with Giuletta, there was a different set of blue-gray walls, each about 10 feet wide facing the audience, alternating with sheer blue-gray curtains. And the epilogue, back in the tavern, returned to the set of the prologue.

Our cast will be reported on after attendance at a regular production; this was only a dress rehearsal.