Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Michael Mayer’s richly textured new production of Verdi’s La Traviata for The Metropolitan Opera, featuring a dazzling 18th-century setting that changes with the seasons. Soprano Diana Damrau plays the tragic heroine, Violetta, and tenor Juan Diego Flórez returns to the Met for the first time in five seasons to sing the role of Alfredo, Violetta’s hapless lover. Baritone Quinn Kelsey is Alfredo’s father, Germont, who destroys their love. See La Traviata in HD on the big screen at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Saturday, December 22 at 12:30pm, part of Atria Senior Living Classical Series and underwritten by Jeanne Cook, Liz & Steven Goldstone and Sabina & Walter Slavin.
With La Traviata, Verdi and Piave fashioned an opera from a play set in contemporary times—an exception in the composer’s long career. Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias was a meditation on the author’s youthful affair with the celebrated prostitute Marie Duplessis, known as a sophisticated and well-read woman whose charms and tact far surpassed her station. The play is still staged today in its original form and exists in several film incarnations, most notably Greta Garbo’s Camille (1936).
For tickets ($25 | Members & Seniors $20 | Students $15 | FREE for students 18 and under) call or visit the box office, 203-438-5795 or go online at ridgefieldplayhouse.org.
The Ridgefield Playhouse is a non-profit performing arts center located at 80 East Ridge, parallel to Main Street, Ridgefield, CT.