A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
by Andre Previn
Set Design: Michael Yeargan
Lighting Designer: Robert Wierzel
Costume Designer: Johann Stegmeir
presented at Washington National Opera 2004, Austin Lyric Opera 2003, and San DIego Opera 2000
***Named second in the Top Ten Arts Events in Austin for 2003
“This East Coast premiere of ‘Streetcar’ has been given an earnest, consummately professional production. Stage director Brad Dalton and designer Michael Yeargan have placed the action in a ‘huge tilted vortex’ with appropriately claustrophobic effect.” – Tim Page, The Washington Post
“Austin Lyric Opera built on its success with this production of ‘Streetcar,’ staged by director Brad Dalton. Dalton kept the drama tightly focused on Michael Yeargan’s set, which was a single room lined with doors and narrowing towards the back like a telescope. Through the production, Austin Lyric Opera made a strong statement about the vitality of its own artistic vision. It’s good to have another Texas company join Houston and Dallas as notable opera producers.” Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle
“Michael Yeargan’s sets and Brad Dalton’s stage direction assumed a starring role in the production. Psychological expression was the name of the game. The concept was effective, as was the minimalist scenery and furniture.” – Staff review, Opera News
“Dalton and Yeargan felt liberated enough to deliver a ‘Streetcar’ unlike anything seen before. Dalton takes full advantage of the visual madhouse, adding hunky men – extra Stanleys – who menace Blanche, along with visualizations of Blanche’s dead husband, ghostly relatives and black-draped women carrying candles. His actors slash and flitter all over the raked stage. Dalton has coached some potent performances from the singers. It’s a blazingly original take on an indelible classic.” – Michael Barnes, Austin American Statesman and Opera Now
“The woman from Mississippi walks down the unfamiliar New Orleans street and sees dingy doorways crowded with sweaty men, their bodies bathed in the molten gold of sunset, their wolfish eyes all on her. In her sister's tiny French Quarter flat, she speaks of funerals back home and the room transforms into a great Gothic mansion, inhabited by a corpselike woman in white bedclothes and spectral mourners in black, carrying candles. She tells a man she is dating about her first marriage, which ended in her husband's suicide, and the young man appears at her side, to be rejected by her once again. These are the visions of Blanche Dubois and we shared them with her in Austin Lyric Opera's production of the opera of that name. Stage director Brad Dalton and his design team built the show around Blanche's point of view, translating her mental state -- distorted, persecuted, exaggerated, haunted by a past she cannot turn loose of -- into literal elements of the setting. The production takes great risks in the service of the work and holds nothing back, resulting in an achievement of grand proportions: a vision of madness from the inside.” – Robert Faires, The Austin Chronicle
“The results are a triumph for Austin Lyric Opera. Set, stage direction and acting merged into a seamless unity, all serving the theatrical point. Maybe Previn’s ‘Streetcar’ didn’t move in San Francisco, but in Austin it was powered by electricity.” – Mike Greenberg, San Antonio Express-News
