Women wearing flashy East-meets-West dresses and men in dark suits frolic drunkenly in a hotel lounge. Behind them can be seen the ends of the hallways for each floor of guest rooms. Couples slip away from the group from time to time, disappear down a hallway and into a room. The whole set is a cylindrical construction that rotates slowly all the time, so displaying all the sides of life laid bare therein.
Award-winning German director Andreas Kriegenburg chose this setting of an urban hotel for his new adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi's three-act opera "Rigoletto," whose world premiere (with Japanese supertitles) was at the New National Theatre, Tokyo (NNTT), last month.
Scheduled to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Verdi's birth, the production, with Pietro Rizzo conducting, also marked a return to the NNTT for Kriegenburg, who debuted there directing "Wozzeck" in its 2009 joint production with the Bavarian State Opera of the 1922 work by Austrian composer Alban Berg.