In the next scene, walking by a row of gray, forbidding houses and wearing a clownish version of a long black coat and top hat - the vivid costumes are by Catherine Zuber - Rigoletto is visibly shaken by a curse that’s just been leveled on him at the palace. No wonder Rigoletto becomes the target of vengeful courtiers, who plot to abduct Gilda, whom they assume to be his mistress. But Kelsey, keeping with the production’s directness, audaciously crosses the line, bullying the count, even slapping him on the back of his head. The willing Rigoletto openly mocks the hapless count. In the first scene, when the duke boasts to Rigoletto of his latest intrigue - with the alluring wife of Count Ceprano - he complains that her husband is in the way. Which is not to say that the staging lacks boldness. Sher told The Times recently that he chose 1920s Berlin as a pre-fascist world of unchecked cruelty and extravagance, enabling an exploration of “how a corrupt leadership infects a culture, infects how wealth and privilege dominate and squish people below it.” Yet while the production did convey this foreboding clash of indulgence and oppression, there were few specific indications of Weimar politics or culture, other than a scene-setting curtain borrowed from the work of the artist George Grosz. When Joshua Barone reviewed this production for The New York Times when it was introduced at the Berlin State Opera in 2019, he wrote that Sher’s treatment of the Weimar Republic came off as “more of a context than a concept.” For the Met, Sher has been able to fully realize his vision, including the introduction of a turntable for Michael Yeargan’s enormous set, which now rotates to allow fluidly cinematic shifts between scenes.
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