The label “eclectic” doesn’t begin to describe the work of director Diane Paulus, who has staged operas, nightclub shows and Broadway musicals with equal success.
Paulus appears to have a real knack for creating pieces for specific spaces. Two years ago, she managed to dust off the counterculture relic “Hair” for a terrific new staging in Central Park as part of the free summer theater series.
When the time came to “transfer” the show to a Broadway house — the Al Hirschfield Theatre — Paulus didn’t just move the show, she reconceived it for indoor presentation and the tighter space of an old-fashioned theater.
Instead of being diminished by a more “formal” presentation, the show gained in power and focus. Last spring, Paulus won a very deserved Tony for best direction of a revival on Broadway.
The director’s resume also includes a wild re-thinking of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a 1970s disco revue — “The Donkey Show” — that ran for six years in a New York club and was also successfully restaged in Europe. (At the moment, Paulus is said to be re-working the piece as a more traditional theater presentation, starting with a revival at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston).
Tomorrow night, Paulus is heading in an exciting new direction with an opera by Joseph Haydn that is being presented at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City through Jan. 28.
“Il Mondo Della Luna (The World on the Moon)” is an opera written in 1777 about a powerful man who refuses to let his daughters marry for love instead of increasing his clout. The women use a phony astronomer and a sleeping potion to trick the nobleman into thinking he has been transported to the moon, where women are allowed to marry the men they love.
Paulus has transformed the planetarium at the American Musuem of Natural History into an intimate opera house where the combination of live singers and musicians with the Seiss Mark IX Star Projector will result in a show designed to delight opera fans and science buffs equally.
“Il Mondo Della Luna” is just the latest boundary-breaking production from Gotham Chamber Opera which last year scored a triumph when it commissioned modern dance giant Mark Morris to stage another Haydn opera, “L’isola diasbitata.” The Gotham company is partnering with ART and the museum on this extraordinarily adventurous show. For ticket information, go to www.ticketcentral.com
