Director Des McAnuff bridges romantic opera, Jersey pop

Not everyone can walk half a mile from an opera house where they are directing Gounod's Faust to the theatre where their musical Jersey Boys, about the Four Seasons pop group, is in the third year of its London run.

The only person who fits this description is Des McAnuff, a one-man whirligig of energy and inspiration with not a finger but a fist in every pie from musicals to plays to film and, for a second time, the rarefied air of the opera house.

"I think I do have a very confused career and if you're kind, you'd call it eclectic but if you're unkind you'd call it anarchic," the 58-year-old McAnuff told Reuters at the Coliseum, home of the English National Opera (ENO).

McAnuff — who is also the artistic director of Canada's not-for-profit Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario — has been spending a lot of time with ENO pulling together the new production of Gounod's 19th-century romantic masterpiece.

The production, about Faust's pact with the devil (aka Mephistopheles) which allows the ageing and suicidal doctor to re-live his youth and seduce the innocent but jewel-bedazzled Marguerite, opens on September 18.

It is, to put it mildly, a much further stretch directing Faust and Jersey Boys than a short walk in the West End theatre district suggests, but McAnuff is taking it in his stride.

"It's relatively new to me [opera], but I'm comfortable that my skill set applies, as a storyteller and as a stager," said McAnuff, whose only previous opera outing was directing Berg's relentlessly bleak Wozzeck for the San Diego Opera in 2007.

Here's what else he had to say about updating Faust to post-World War II and about doing an opera about the late race-car (Lamborghini) driver, Ayrton Senna da Silva.

There is an endless debate in opera between those who say modern directors take too many liberties and others who say updating old warhorses has saved them from oblivion. Where do you come down on this one?
I have a healthy respect for tradition, but I think people often confuse tradition with convention so they are used to seeing something done a particular way.

But we'll never know how these productions like Gounod or Shakespeare were really produced. It's guess work. I reckon we'd be horrified if we saw them. They wouldn't speak to us because they are not of our time.

So you have made Faust, originally set in 16th century Germany, "of our time" by bringing it into the nuclear age. How did you get there?
Years ago I heard a story about a physicist visiting Nagasaki and deciding never to practise physics again. That had a very profound effect on me. So it seemed like a very good framework.

Having said that, it's no more than just that. It's a window through which to view this story. But the story is the one that comes from Goethe and that Gounod shows.

You must be somewhat pleased with yourself, having come from a childhood in suburban Ontario, through 16 years as artistic director at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, to Broadway with Big River, The Who's Tommy and Jersey Boys and now to direct an opera for the ENO that will go on to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
It feels great. I'm very happy to be as busy as I am. It's a privilege to get up in the morning and do what you love and what you believe in.

Including, as it says in several articles about you, racing a yellow Lamborghini sports car?
That's not true. I am doing an opera about Senna, but this is what happens in journalism these days. One journalist got that from another journalist, who shall remain nameless. I don't have a yellow Lamborghini, I don't have a Lamborghini, and I don't race them.

But the bit about Senna, who died in a crash in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, that's true, right? And if so, why an opera about a race-car driver?
[There's] the historical scale that opera needs and we don't have many kings and queens so you have to find some sort of a contemporary parallel.

When you understand that, you can shoot for that kind of titanic emotional scale. And I think it goes in stages, things go in and out of fashion, and a lot of people are finding opera again at this moment. Also, I'm always attracted to things when people take chances.