Director Keturah Stickann Returns to San Diego Opera for its Season-Opening ‘La bohème’
Stage director Keturah Stickann is back in town directing San Diego Opera’s 2024-2025 season-opening production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème. Four years ago Stickann directed the same opera for the local company, but under completely different conditions.
Keturah Stickann {photo courtesy of San Diego Opera]
The country was still under the strict requirements of of the Covid lockdown, so San Diego Opera presented La bohème as a drive-in opera in the Pechanga Arena Parking Lot, and patrons watched the opera on large screens while seated “safely” in their cars.
“At first everyone was skeptical about this concept for the production,” Stickann explained as she recalled the events of 2020. “How could we portray this moving story of love and death with all of the characters remaining 15 feet apart?
“But when we got everyone involved on a Zoom call and explained that this would be a production in which Rodolfo was recalling and writing about the individuals and events he had encountered 10 years previously, the concept stood on its own two feet. And the singers aa well as everyone else jumped on board.”
This season’s production also will use the idea of a memory opera, but it will be staged in the San Diego Civic Theatre, the company’s traditional home. And the singers won’t have to observe the social distancing of 2020.
The 2020 La bohème was hardly Stickann’s San Diego Opera debut. “Earlier in my career I was a dancer for San Diego Opera productions,” Stickann noted. She began her professional career as a classically trained dancer, but soon turned to stage directing. Among other assignments, she directed San Diego Opera’s highly successful 2018 production of Puccini’s Turandot at San Diego Civic Theatre.
San Diego Opera General Director David Bennett selected Puccini’s La bohème to open the 2024-2025 season in part as a tribute to the company’s observance of its 60th anniversary season: in October of 1965 in the Civic Theatre, La bohème was the company’s very first production.
“It is the perfect opera,” Stickann observed. “It has everything from love to betrayal to buffoonery to friendship that pulls at the heartstrings. I never tire of this opera, but it is a challenge to keep it fresh. I don’t think that means finding strange ways to present it, but rather paying close attention to the words of the libretto and not getting lazy as you interpret them. After all, Giacosa and Illica wrote a fantastic libretto for Puccini!”
But La bohème is also one of the most familiar and audience friendly operas in the repertory, and bringing audiences back into theaters has been one of the most significant challenges of the post-Covid world. “Coming back from the pandemic, many people no longer want to be in crowds,” Stickann observed. “It is up to us, the singers, directors, and conductors, to convince people that experiencing music in person is worth it.”
San Diego Opera will present Puccini’s ‘La bohème’ in San Diego Civic Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on November 1 & 2, 2024, and at 2:00 p.m. on November 3, 2024. Casts include sopranos Kathleen O’Mara, Sarah Tucker, and Latonia Moore, as well as tenors Koshua Blue and César Delgado. The conductor is Lidiya Yankovskaya.
Ken Herman, a classically trained pianist and organist, has covered music for the San Diego Union, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego Edition, and for sandiego.com. He has won numerous awards, including first place for Live Performance and Opera Reviews in the 2017, the 2018, and the 2019 Excellence in Journalism Awards competition held by the San Diego Press Club. A Chicago native, he came to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree and stayed.Read more…