When Opera Productions Turn Into Art Installations

“Instead of consistently cooperating with the opera, the staging challenged it.” David Patrick Stearns considers William Kentridge’s Metropolitan Opera production of Lulu and Chas Rader-Shieber’s Curtis/Opera Philadelphia staging of Capriccio: “Too often, poetic ambiguity can seem like a smoke screen, insurance of sorts that if the operagoers are kept guessing, they won’t pass judgment.”