MIDDLEBURY — Director Doug Anderson lifted up a bolt of magic fabric before the packed Town Hall Theater audience at Friday’s performance of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and let it slowly unspool, delicately unwinding into wave after wave of beautiful music.
Editor’s note: Doug Anderson’s contemporary staging of the Massenet opera “Thaïs” opened at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater last Friday and will be performed at 8 p.m. on June 14, 15 (with alternate cast) and 16. Here are responses to the work from two reviewers.
I don’t know Doug Anderson that well but I learned something new about him this past Friday; he’s not afraid to take on a challenge. To stage a production of a complex opera written in the 19th century, about a repressed monk and a promiscuous courtesan from ancient Egypt, and make it appealing to a modern audience, takes vision and some serious nerve.
