Videographer Luke Halls’ large screen above the proscenium shows what looks like a Big Brother-like reality TV shoot, following our heroin everywhere and even inside her mind.

Like it or not, no opera production today is complete without video projection. During her mad scene, the sets from previous acts are all spinning on the cyclorama, mirroring Lucia’s feverish, deranged mind, including the motel room where she kills her bridegroom Arturo. After the initial shock has subsided, the director’s message gradually becomes clear – Lucia’s madness is in fact a result of drug-induced psychosis, exacerbated by the fake news of Edgardo’s betrayal. The starkly blue-collared scenery and costumes contrasted sharply with the smartly coiffured and dressed audience of the opening night audience. Blanca Añón designed the gritty working-class costumes. Lizzie Clachan’s clever sets, anchored by a tall house (a symbolic Castle of Lammermoor), spin like a cyclorama to reveal a pharmacy, a chapel, a movie drive-in, a motel, and a backyard wedding. For the season opener Lucia di Lammermoor, director Simon Stone set the seventeenth-century Scottish period piece in a present-day American Midwestern town fallen on hard times with drug and economic issues. As with many things post-pandemic, the new normal in opera means many perennial-popular productions were retired in favor of new narratives on contemporary social issues. This is the Los Angeles Opera’s first ‘normal’ season after the Covid-pandemic lockdown.

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